


To Hilary, from Prison

by Naraht



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Additional Warnings May Apply, F/M, Gen, M/M, Prisoner of War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-03-21 05:05:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3678690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only wartime ending Julian envisioned was his own death. </p><p>After becoming a prisoner of war, he turns to escape attempts, acting and new friends in an attempt to come to terms with his separation from Hilary - and with being alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



> Thank you to Lilliburlero for beta reading. Thank you also to both Oursin and Tigerfort for catching some historical slips. None of the above bear any responsibility for the errors that remain.
> 
> The title is a reference to Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison."

The first time Julian's plane was shot down he was flying low over Kent. A sunny afternoon with cumulus clouds rising to the west, shafts of sun glancing between them. _They always come out of the sun_ , he thought as he was wrestling with the controls, a distant reproach heard in the tones of his first flight instructor, as though it were a voiceover in a film.

 _Is this what it feels like to be about to die?_ he wondered because it seemed the appropriate reflection on such an occasion, forgetting in the flurry of checking instruments and attempting to restart a flamed-out engine that he had sensed that approaching angel twice before. Both times it had been infinitely more real and present. His only emotion now was a faint curiosity, evanescing like a vapour trail at altitude.

Conscious thought returned to him only after he had coaxed his crippled Spitfire to a bumpy belly landing in a field full of turnips outside Haslemere. He climbed out of the plane, felt for the packet of cigarettes he had forgot to buy that morning, and spent the rest of the afternoon summoning his most diffident air of apology in the service of mollifying a farmer outraged at the destruction of his fence and hedges and crop. But even this was instinct. He felt nothing, only acted the part.

That evening, in the purgatorial afterlife of a blacked-out train bound for London, he began to feel the creeping grip of guilt and regret. He thought of his new Spitfire abandoned in a field, as though it were a horse that he had hunted to destruction. He felt the solid thump of his heart underneath his soot-smudged uniform and was abashed to be still living, as if his life itself were a boast in bad taste. (It was not the first time he had felt that way.) Despite all the extremity of the landing he had not shed a drop of blood; the only marks left on him were bruises, quick to heal.

 _I shall have to tell Hilary_ , he thought. _She'll be glad._

Her imagined gratitude came to him more powerfully than his own. Hilary would stroke him soothingly, searching for any scrape or scar, hold him and rock him to calm the nerves that were afflicting him only now. He sat trembling in the darkness of the railway carriage, wishing for one of her own cigarettes and knowing that his hand would not be steady enough to light it. She would light it for him, of course, as though nothing could be more natural.

_You don't deserve her, though. She knows it; she's only too good to say. Perhaps it would have been for the best if..._

He did not allow himself to finish the thought.

In the end war had achieved what all of his most winsome persuasions could not. Hilary had married him. Death for him would mean a widow's pension for her, and eleven hundred a year, and (eventually, when his mother... but that was another thought best left unfinished) that she would one day become the mistress of Larch Hill. Perhaps it would not mean so much to her but it was all he could leave her; this, though he had never said so, had added its urgency to his suit. A week after standing in the Cheltenham register office to take his vows, he had found himself in a lawyer's office, the black ink of his signature on his will spelling out a name which was his only by the presumption of law, and never by the right of blood.

 _A consummation devoutly to be wished,_ he thought grimly, and shivered, though the actual consummation had left nothing to be desired. 

It had - and the memory moved him even in the misery of a cramped third-class carriage - been everything promised to him during his vision. Not attenuated by reality but intensified, the sordidness of physical joining transformed into the spiritual union promised in the marriage service. He was hers, now, forever. And she would save him.

He realised now why death had not felt like death. He had never felt the touch of her intercession, nor the anticipated approach of salvation. There had been only a blank.

***

The second time Julian was shot down, he was flying over Germany. But the feeling was the same.

 _Perhaps she'll forgive me,_ he thought, tumbling in grey clouds, and did not know whether he meant Hilary, for dying, or his mother, for the effrontery of having been born. His imagination returned to the parish church where he had been christened. In his mind's eye he saw the name uncompromisingly incised on the war memorial, the one that had reproached him since he had learned to read - _Maj. Richard Fleming_. Beneath it he now saw inscribed _Sqn. Ldr. Julian Richard Fleming_. There was a pleasing symmetry in the vision. His mother had always wanted him to be like his father; this was the only way in which he ever could.

All this went through his mind in an instant. A moment later, impelled by nothing more than the insistence of muscle memory, he reached out and pulled the ripcord of his parachute.

He seemed to drift upwards into the heavens.


	2. Chapter 2

"The war is over for you," said his German interrogator.

"It rather seems that way, doesn't it?" replied Julian politely.

He gave his name, rank and serial number, a process which (disappointingly) had all the drama of applying for a library card. After that there came blandishments and threats offered up by rote. On base only the week before they had been warned against the ruse of the Red Cross form, so Julian refrained, although he gazed longingly at the section marked 'next of kin' and imagined filling in a beloved and familiar name.

_Mrs. Richard Fleming_  
_Larch Hill_  
_nr. Lynchwick_  
_Glos._  
_England_

He had written the address every week in school, tracing the letters carefully, and remembering always to spell it _Lynchwick_ \- the alternative, _Lynchwyck_ , his mother declared by turns affected and uneducated. When sending him away to school she had told him that it was always a disappointment to receive a letter carelessly addressed, and that if there was any danger of such a letter she would rather he didn't write at all. He had always written. As he had shaped the words, line by line, his imagination carried him across the Thames to the green hills of his native county, to the parish church and pub and village green of Lynchwick, and finally down the narrow, hedge-lined road to his own beloved home.

But that had been school. And after that university. Now he was twenty-seven, four years a married man. His imagination flipped back a page; the image was quickly effaced, replaced with another, less familiar.

_Mrs. Julian Fleming_  
_Royal Infirmary_  
_Bristol_  
_Glos._  
_England_

And yet the spaces on the form remained resolutely blank.

"I'm afraid they don't tell us much of anything," he said, realising that he had hardly heard the interrogator's last question. "I hope I don't seem uncooperative."

Having tilted his head with an expression of appeal, he winced as he felt the strain in his neck from the ejection. He was in remarkably good shape, considering, apart from a faint throbbing in his head. 

"Actually I'm feeling rather ill," he added hopefully. "I don't suppose I could see the doctor?"

The interrogator looked doubtful.

Julian paused for a moment, thinking of his skull and the fragile brain within, the precision with which Hilary had demonstrated for him the operation which had saved his life. The weeks he'd spent afterwards, at the insistence of his mother and Dr Lowe, recuperating in a darkened room. He imagined a delicate tear, something shaken loose, the blood beginning to pool inside his skull.

He winced again, more dramatically this time, and put one hand to his temple. Under his fingertips he could feel the subtle pulsing of a vein. He began to believe it himself. His headache seemed to intensify; it frightened him for a moment, thinking that perhaps he could conjure it into being.

"A few years ago I hit my head," he said. "I fell off my horse; I nearly died. She saved - they saved my life. Emergency surgery. A delay of a few hours and I would have had it." He was rather channeling Hilary here. He knew the technical terms now, he could have explained it as she or Sanderson would have done, but he feared it might sound too worked-up. "It was touch and go whether they'd let me fly at all afterwards, they thought the G-forces might be too much. And now, you know I ejected from my plane, I hadn't the choice... My head is aching terribly. Please, if I could just...?"

After Julian was tucked into the rough hospital sheets of Dulag Luft he wondered whether he had told the interrogator more than he ought. More than name, rank and serial number, to be sure, but could they really glean anything of value from the tale of Biscuit and the Cottage Hospital? There was no knowing. He felt guilty for this obscure transgression - and for what? - but there was nothing to be done about it now.

He was quietly amused by the suspicious looks his tale earned from the German doctors; Dr. Lowe had looked much the same when Julian had told him the story of his black eye. _Habits of untruthfulness_ , his mother would have said. _Too vivid an imagination and too little conscience to go along with it._

One liked to believe it was now in the service of a worthy cause, but it did him little good. After twelve hours' cursory observation he was discharged without comment, and without the chance to begin planning an escape attempt. Or whatever he had thought he might be doing.

He spent a week in solitary confinement after that, only occasionally relieved by German visitors who offered cigarettes and sympathy - the latter in uncomfortably fluent English - and went away again, disappointed by his lack of trust.

A more explicitly purgatorial setting could not have been imagined. Julian was left alone with his thoughts, a situation which his mother had always maintained was fraught with danger. For once he agreed with her. He paced the tiny, overheated room, driven by hunger, looking out at a tiny scrap of blue sky which offered him no consolation.

He never would have admitted it in the mess, but he knew he was a good pilot, perhaps an excellent one. Yet though he loved flying - the purity of its physical demands, its sense of liberation - he would never be a flying ace, for he was a poor shot; he had not even been able to hit the rabbits in his mother's garden. Tormented by an imaginative sympathy that was all too keen, he could not muster the will or the desire to kill.

The only wartime ending he had ever been able to envision was death - not that of others, but his own. He had once admitted this to Hilary, unthinking, and been so shocked by her sudden tears that he had never mentioned it again. He had thought, somehow, that she had always known.

If not death, then terrible burns, the end to a beauty for which he had never asked and which he had never deserved. It had happened to other men, to his comrades. Why should he have escaped? To still be alive and still whole, when so many had died, was its own punishment. Captivity could hardly compare.

***

Stalag Luft was miles from anywhere, set within a pine forest which seemed at once depressingly scrubby and threateningly deep. It was hundreds of miles east of where Julian had been shot down. Practically in Poland, he supposed, although geography had never been his strong point and it had been difficult to keep one's bearings during the long, gruelling train journey.

Now he was here. Arriving ought to have been some consolation, an end to the torments of the unknown, but Julian could hardly feel it so. Having finally been released into the compound, he stared in dawning horror at the low, rough, barracks huts, the dark, distant trees, and the expanse of bare earth and barbed wire stretching between them. This was all there was. He found himself realising, seemingly for the first time, that although the war was over for him, it might be years until he saw his home again. It might be never.

As he stood contemplating his lot, a man wearing a ragged Pilot Officer's uniform came past dragging a piece of string along the dusty ground.

"How do you do?" said Julian expectantly.

"Oh, hullo." There was a note of surprise in the man's voice; he looked up quickly at Julian and then back down at the ground. "Have you met my duck?"

Although this was hardly the greeting that Julian had expected, he was grateful for the chance to think of something other than his own sorrows. One never said 'no' when improvising.

"Is this your duck?" he replied. "His feathers are lovely. But does he feel the lack of water much, being here?"

The man looked up with a wry smile. "Oh, there's a fire pond. We get by."

And with that he continued on his way, leading his duck.

Julian smiled to himself. The brief encounter, odd though it was, had done something to help his nerves. 

Nonetheless he stepped into the barracks hut - which would be his home for God knew how long - with the same fluttery, unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach, the sense of being wholly adrift, without any recognised role to play. Although the large room was constructed of rough wood, and crowded with double bunks, and although the smell of cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air, the place had a strange sense of familiarity that could only have come from the dormitories at Marchester.

It was, thought Julian, just like starting at a new school. He had been shot down alone; he came to camp alone. Not for him the comforting camaraderie of a bomber crew, who might arrive together and make their own self-sufficient circle. He was the new boy; he would have to prove himself.

At that hour of the day, late morning, the room was almost empty. There were only a handful of men sitting around a table playing cards. They all looked up as he entered.

"I'm Fleming," said Julian. "Julian Fleming. I was shot down... but I suppose one hardly needs to say that. They told me this would be my room."

Another long beat. If it had been a play he would have been holding his breath in the wings, wondering when to prompt the next line. Wondering what it might be.

"Featherstonehaugh," said one of the men finally, with a lazy reluctance. "Feathers."

"Who are your people?" asked another. "Where do you come from?"

A schoolboy of thirteen might have asked this and been forgiven. Coming from an adult it seemed shockingly direct, but Julian had arrived in the camp alone with no one to vouch for him. German spies were not unknown and perhaps one could not blame them for wanting to be careful about who they trusted.

For the next ten minutes Julian was prompted to a recitation in minute detail of his antecedents, relations, educational history and other associations. It was no use. Of the four men sitting round the table, three were old Etonians and one an old Harrovian, unmoved by Julian's Marcastrian connections. Although Feathers was an Oxford man, he had been at Christ Church, and gone up five years before Julian; try as they might, they could establish no link there. And the branches of the provincial English gentry from which he had sprung were too obscure and too minor for these men, who were socially rather more distinguished. Julian found himself wishing that he had heeded his mother's wishes and joined a London club after going down from Oxford.

"The Gloucestershire Flemings," he repeated in summary. "My father was Richard Fleming. He was a Major in the 4th Glosters. He died at the Somme. And my mother is a Stanton. Her second cousin married Lord Northbourne. If you've not heard of them, I don't know what else to say, but if you look in Burke's..."

"The Germans have a copy too, I'm sure," said his main interlocutor, Jamie Stuart Ogilvie-Keir-Gordon, whose triple-barrelled surname had presumably been verified to the satisfaction of his fellow prisoners.

Julian shrugged helplessly, wishing now that he had never had started. It felt oddly dishonest to claim Richard Fleming as his father now, but he did not see what else he could have said. One could only imagine the incredulity with which they would have received the intelligence of his real father's origins. Hilary was his lodestar now, his only constant, yet _Hilary Mansell, of the Shropshire Mansells, Member of the Royal College of Surgeons_ would not have come across much better.

"Look, Fleming," said Feathers. "Until we know who you are, we can't know you. That's all there is to it. I suppose we shall have to see if someone remembers you from Northolt."

Yet he sounded unenthusiastic about the idea of tracing Julian's identity through wartime service - in comparison it meant little, particularly within the democratic RAF - and made no immediate move to do so. 

Having been put politely but firmly into Coventry, Julian spent the afternoon lying in his new bunk, reading an old copy of _Punch_ , until sleep mercifully claimed him.

He was woken with a start by raucous laughter, and sat up. Twilight was falling outside. Into the room came trooping a crowd of men, its other residents, back from a football match.

"We've a new boy," said Feathers, jerking his chin towards Julian.

Talk of the score stilled instantly as they turned to study the new arrival. Julian, self-conscious, dropped his gaze. His hair had been mercilessly shorn as part of the camp induction and without the usual locks falling across his forehead he felt unpleasantly exposed.

"Fleming!" said one of the men. "It's J. R. Fleming, isn't it? I would have recognised that face anywhere."

"Yes," Julian replied hopefully, getting to his feet. "That's me."

"Don't you remember me? Parkhurst. From Marchester."

He did remember now, as it happened. Parkhurst had been a year or two above him and in a different house. They had never known one another particularly well and - apart from a rather _pro forma_ pass behind the boathouse when Julian had been in the fourth - all he could recall of his former schoolfellow was a talent for cricket and his intense dislike of rhubarb. Parkhurst had gone on to a crammer when Julian was still in the fifth, and passed entirely beyond his orbit. He had not thought of him since school; certainly he would never have expected to be so glad to see him again.

"Of course," he said, "of course I do."

There was a shaking of hands and a slapping of backs, followed by a general exchange of cigarettes. Parkhurst made genial introductions all round; neither Feathers nor Jamie Ogilvie-Keir-Gordon gave any impression that they had made Julian's acquaintance a few hours previously, nor that they had declined it in the terms that they had used. It was, thought Julian, a rather impressive performance. His mother would have approved.

"A good chap," Parkhurst murmured to his friends. "And a damned pretty girl on stage, I can tell you. We had some jolly times at Marchester. Bit of bad luck since then."

This last was addressed to Julian directly. For a moment he could not imagine what Parkhurst meant; then he remembered how he had come here, that he had been shot down, that he was a prisoner for the duration. The twist of anxiety in his stomach, which had abated for the last few minutes, resumed its reign.

"But never mind," Parkhurst continued. One imagined that he had heard his fill of capture stories some months earlier. "I've been here since '40 myself; founding member as it happens. _The war is over for you_ , Fleming, just remember that. Welcome to Stalag Luft. It's not so bad if you know the right people."

***

Parkhurst and his friends were, Julian presumed, the right people. They were not so bad as long as one enjoyed hunting, shooting, gambling, sport, motorcars and flying, or the discussion thereof. On some of these Julian was sound, on others rather weak; but he muddled along, taking his conversational colour from the others. Rather quickly he established himself as one of their number, not so much through anything he said - for he said, on the whole, very little - as through the right sort of accent, the right sort of manner, the right sort of laughter in the right places.

This challenge kept his attention for a time. He had not realised how lonely he had been, how difficult it was to be without the comforting regard of another soul, that reflection in the eyes of another that makes one real.

Yet after a time the conversation of Parkhurst's circle, such as it was, began to pall. Or perhaps it was merely that his homesickness became more acute.

Along with the rest of the camp he found himself longing for letters, a preoccupation so common as to be hardly worth mentioning. Letters from England were delayed, promised, anticipated, mourned, despaired of... and, finally, received at Stalag Luft weeks or months late in no order whatsoever.

Julian had no letter at all in the first or second delivery and only one precious missive in the third. He spent long minutes gazing at Hilary's scrawling, matter-of-fact hand on the envelope, both his address and her own on the reverse. He had never had a letter from her until his entry into the RAF, so it seemed to carry something of the whole flavour of the war.

Reading it, he was plunged immediately into the middle of Hilary's wartime existence. (A note in the upper right proclaimed it to be _#11_.) She had been up to London and, though she did not say why she had gone, she offered a detailed description of a trip to see Terence Rattigan's _Flare Path_ , directed by Anthony Asquith, at the Apollo. Julian, who had not known there was a new Rattigan play, read both this and the enclosed review from the _Times_ with avid interest. Guiltily he found himself less interested in Hilary's troubles with Mr. Scot-Hallard, the new chief of her surgical firm, and her chances of taking her Fellowship. He told himself that he would be re-reading the letter many times, and passed onwards.

There was an indignant paragraph about the state of rationing - merely the mention of lobster being eaten in London hotels made Julian's stomach rumble in sympathy - and then at the end an offhanded mention of having had tea with his mother in Cheltenham. Julian was stunned; to his knowledge, during the four years of his marriage, his mother had not relaxed further than occasionally deigning to acknowledge Hilary's existence. Bringing them into proximity had been unthinkable. He attempted to envision them sitting in a teashop together under a flag of uneasy truce, was distracted by the thought of Dundee cake, and finally wondered whether Hilary had attempted to discuss _Flare Path_ with her. He hoped not; but then Hilary was sensible, wasn't she?

 _Your mother sends her love, of course,_ she had concluded, _and hopes that her letters have got through. She's knitting you another jumper. Though I haven't the time for knitting I think of you always, my dearest, and dream of you at night._

_All my love ever,  
Hilary_

_P.S. I've enclosed a picture as you asked._

Julian, who hardly remembered having asked this - he supposed he must have done it as a matter of course in an earlier letter of his own - extracted the photograph from a corner of the envelope. It was a small snap, rather badly dogeared in the post but still clear: a young Hilary in a narrowly-belted white dress, her hands buried past the wrists in its deep pockets, smiling brilliantly at someone or something just to one side of the camera. The picture, which he had never seen before, was unposed but beautiful. It had obviously been taken years before, perhaps when she was still a medical student; she did not look any older than his own twenty-seven years. 

He noted, with a detached, aesthetic feeling, the hollow of her neck, which he had so often nuzzled and kissed. But not this Hilary. He had never met her; he had probably been at university, or more likely still at school, when the photograph was taken. He admired it with an admixture of disappointment, thinking longingly of Hilary as she was now, the Hilary that he knew, Hilary as life had made her, and then told himself that he was being wholly unreasonable.

Though at one time he had surely wanted the photograph, it left him now with a flat feeling of incompletion that once upon a time he had considered the inevitable consequence of self-abuse. Now he knew it was connected to something deeper.

If he had been asked he would have staunchly and sincerely defended Hilary's beauty, which without him noticing had become his standard for beauty both male and female. (He had caught a glimpse of the back of a head of chestnut hair while on parade the previous week and felt a wave of spontaneous desire that had caught him totally by surprise.) But this had come - he would have realised if he had enquired into the question, which he had no wish to do - purely through his love for her, rather than the reverse. His first acquaintance with her had come through a vision, in which sight had been unnecessary. Though he now appreciated her beauty as much as any man - one assumed - appreciated his wife, he never forgot that it was an appreciation of the surface and not the essence beneath. To attach oneself to surfaces was to ask for disappointment.

"That your wife?" asked Parkhurst, looking over his shoulder before he could react. "Rather nice."

Julian replied reluctantly, feeling that to acknowledge the earthly tie - however dearly desired it had been - was a betrayal of the spiritual bond. "Yes, that's my wife. Her name is Hilary."

"Write and ask her to take a picture in a bathing costume next. That dress doesn't do her any favours."

"I shouldn't dream of asking her that," said Julian, borrowing for the purpose his mother's frosty tone, which to his knowledge had served to bring to a close every unwelcome conversation but one.

It did not fail him now. Parkhurst shook his head in half-fond exasperation and wandered away.

Julian considered putting the photograph up by the head of his bunk. This, surely, was what he had intended when he had written for it; it was what the other men did. But now that he was faced with the idea of putting Hilary's face and form on public display it seemed unutterably vulgar.

He put it under his mattress instead, but one could do nothing in a crowded barracks room without being observed, so this hardly seemed a place of greater safety. Although Hilary's letter was tucked away safely there already, his only qualm having been the dirtiness of his straw _paliasse_ , a photograph seemed different.

A week after the letters arrived, when he had studied it and memorised every line, Julian burnt the photograph privately and ceremoniously in the barracks brazier. He never asked Hilary for another photograph and she never sent one.

***

Julian ought to have found captivity easy enough to bear. In a manner of speaking he had been trained to it: prep school, public school, and a bare three years of freedom at Oxford before his enforced return to Larch Hill. His mother's supervision had been in some ways a good deal more exacting than that of the German guards; she would never have stood for the sloppiness of the roll calls, men slouching sleepily in the dawn light, unshaven, coughing, dressed in the rumpled odds and ends of uniforms that were all they owned.

Disgracing the uniform was what she would have said. But she would have been wrong.

This realisation came to him, shockingly, one morning during the count. He was not used to considering his mother wrong - even when she self-evidently was - and the thought so surprised him that he failed for a moment to register that _appel_ was over.

For some of the men this sort of small rebellion meant a great deal. It was all they had to cling to. Julian sympathised with this, though he did not understand it. 

For his part he was willing to follow the rules, petty and disagreeable though they might have been. Having been forcibly removed from the fight bothered him little - indeed, it came as rather a relief, although he knew better than to admit it. Unlike some of the men, he did not long for nights out in London, for clubs and girls and drinking and all the supposed accoutrements of freedom. Being free to wander the surrounding countryside might have been an appealing thought, were it not for the dreary pine forests surrounding the camp, which held little appeal for him. Better food would have been nice, he supposed, but as long as it was enough to keep body and soul together he did not see the point of complaining.

All in all he ought to have been able to persuade himself to contentment, or to a resignation so close to contentment as to be indistinguishable. And yet he was not.

Julian was alone. Having a letter from Hilary had, paradoxically, only made that clearer to him. He was conscious of it always, a bone-deep sense of distance that never truly left him. Of abandonment, though he knew perfectly well that it was not she who had gone away. The superficial, hearty companionship of his fellow prisoners could touch this not at all.

He had expected death; he had not died. In his better moments he had reconciled himself to this. But he could not reconcile himself to the withdrawal of her love, of salvation, that he had felt in that moment of extremity. With that assurance he could have borne anything. Without it, he was lost.

In his free hours - too many hours - he found himself roaming the boundaries of the camp, where the trip wire ten feet inside the barbed wire fence marked the liminal zone whose slightest transgression meant death.

To be shot while attempting escape would not be the worst end that could be devised. It would be quick; if his motive were unknown, it might even be called a noble end. He found himself straying closer and closer to the line, glancing upwards at the silhouettes of the guards in their wooden towers. It would be so easy, so simple; a moment's inattention and it would be all up. He would scarcely even know - or if he did know, it would mean that forgiveness and salvation had come after all. And that knowledge seemed almost worth dying to achieve.

The ground inside the warning wire was worn into thick, sticky mud by the tramping feet of hundreds of prisoners, all doing their dutiful exercise circuits. Julian circled with the others, alone amidst the crowd. Day by day he had found himself closer to the wire, magnetically drawn by its mingled promise and threat. That morning the nearest prisoners to him were more than twenty feet away, three men talking intently together with lowered heads and lowered voices. They took no notice of him.

Outside the warning wire the sandy soil, undisturbed by boots, was scattered with flowers. A moment's work to step across the wire and pick one. They might say that the balance of his mind had been disturbed; they might be right. Hilary, who had accepted him at his worst, would understand.

And yet it was all too simple. It would be wrong, a sacrifice unsought and out of season. A cheat. Nothing could come of it.

He shook his head, weaving suddenly away from the wire, stumbling across the path of another prisoner who rebuked him loudly for his transgression. But he dared not stay near. He could not trust himself.

If he were to be shot, he thought, he ought to make some effort to do his duty first. He determined to fix his mind upon escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The camp in which Julian is imprisoned is loosely based on Stalag Luft III, the site of the Great Escape. However the looseness of the inspiration means that I take no responsibility for exact correspondences. And you won't find the Great Escape mentioned anywhere in this story.
> 
> The social milieu of Julian's barracks hut, including one of the named characters, is based on the Italian POW camp experiences of Eric Newby as recounted in _Love and War in the Apennines_. "Feathers" Featherstonehaugh, however, is my own creation.
> 
> The photograph of Hilary described here may bear a certain similarity to [this one](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/Naraht/media/Book%20covers/Mary%20Renault/tumblr_my4hdhzfTz1qgqjq5o1_r4_500.png.html) of Deborah Kerr.


	3. Chapter 3

At Stalag Luft escape was a hobby and a way of life.

As a newcomer it was a world difficult to penetrate. Conversations fell inexplicably silent when one entered the room; the movements and daily rounds of one's fellow men were clothed in mystery. But for the initiated - as Julian soon was, thanks to the testimonial of his old schoolmate - a whole new world opened up. Tunnels were being dug under the wire, and excavated sand dispersed around the compound; radios were being constructed around vacuum tubes obtained through bribery of the guards; artists sat painstakingly forging typed identity documents with nothing more than pen and ink. The men who loitered aimlessly around the compound were revealed to be lookouts, signalling inconspicuously whenever the appearance of a German guard threatened these elaborate preparations. Inside the barracks in the evenings, men discussed the progress of the tunnels and the probability of achieving a 'home run,' as they called an escape which reached home, with all the enthusiasm of followers of sport.

In Julian's barracks there were three men who sat on the camp Escape Committee. Parkhurst was one of them so Julian soon found himself co-opted as an honorary member.

"You'll be wanting your own crack at it soon, Fleming," said Parkhurst one quiet afternoon. The four of them sat at the roughly carpentered barracks table as if playing cards, but the cards stood idle and unregarded in their hands. In the smeared window a trapped fly buzzed noisily.

"I shouldn't dream of jumping the queue," said Julian, and meant it.

He had seen one of the tunnels already - _a nasty, dirty, sandy hole_ , as one of his university English tutors might have put it - and, while he had been fascinated by it, he had no great desire to spend more time there than necessary. It was more like a mine or a factory, full of wooden props and strung with dim lights, cramped with men digging wearily or hauling sand back to the surface to be dispersed. It had none of the grandeur of the caves that he had known and, though he was not in the least claustrophobic, it did not speak to him of escape. Julian had other ideas.

"I'd rather try walking out," he added casually. "If there were some way one could get hold of a German uniform, that is."

This was neither original nor entirely direct on his part. He knew very well that counterfeit uniforms and civilian outfits were being sewn across the camp - costumes, he always thought first, but with these costumes a lack of verisimilitude could mean death. And he was hardly the first to have tried walking out of a prison camp: as a day labourer, in disguise, through a ruse or through distraction. The possibilities were endless.

What he was seeking was permission and this was not so easy to come by. First one had to go before the compound committee, then the planning committee, and finally the camp Escape Committee, a term spoken so reverentially by the prisoners that one could hear the capital letters. 

Shepherded through it all by Parkhurst, Julian maintained the same attitude of benign, agreeable fatalism that had carried him through Dulag Luft - and, if he were honest with himself, through most of his life. At thirteen, public school had shocked him with the uncompromisingly impersonal nature of its rules; at home he had been used to the mystifying unpredictability of his mother's wishes and, as an only child, to considering himself, alongside her, as the measure of all things. At school his doings had been of no consequence unless he transgressed the rules, and he himself had been neither loved nor hated. This had been at first distressing - he had been more homesick than most schoolboys of his age - but he had quickly and unconsciously adjusted himself to it, paradoxically breathing the breath of freedom while learning the meaningless, petty minutiae that together made up his schooldays.

Life in a stalag was merely school writ large. This he had realised early on - and, because he was not thirteen anymore, realised consciously. Even at twenty-three he might not have faced up to it, but Hilary's influence, and her rigorous habits of honesty, had told.

He mused upon this through a long, cold December, when mud turned into grotesquely rutted ice, and flurries of snow drifted unthinkingly down into captivity. Permission had come eventually, as he had known it would; all that remained was to wait for a guard's uniform to be sewn. But his time was not wasted. 

He spent his days loitering in the yard like so many of the other men, with effort training his usual erect posture to an inconspicuous slouch. He smoked, because the other men smoked, because it was warming, and because it made him think of Hilary. No doubt the German guards thought him merely another man at loose ends; or, if they were both suspicious and perceptive, one of the many look-outs scattered through the camp whose role was to signal inconspicuously if they arrived upon the scene out of turn. But his was a different game and a different role, one for which he prepared as assiduously as ever in OUDS.

He watched for one of the guards in particular, a youngish man whose obvious limp had kept him out of the Wehrmacht. In broken English he had confided that his mother, who was ill herself, now considered it a blessing. Julian, guiltily, considered it an opportunity. He traced Karl's movements with fixed attention, memorising his routes, his ways, and his habits.

The task left too much free time for thought. The masters at his school had seemingly been convinced that too much reflection in a boy was unhealthy. So for that matter had his mother; he remembered her concern over his lengthy adolescent baths. As a boy he had wondered what they had been so concerned to stop him thinking about - apart from the obvious, which was banal and uninteresting. The terrible secret was that he had often not been thinking about anything in particular - repeating lines of poetry to himself, watching the way that the rippled reflections of light off water painted themselves across the ceiling, studying the movement of his own hands.

Now it was more difficult to submerge himself in aesthetic contemplation. He supposed he had lost his innocence, and been so innocent that he had not noticed at the time.

From his spot at the corner of the barracks he watched his fellow prisoners crossing the compound, on their way to card games, lectures, football matches, 'circuit bashing,' anything to fill the time. There were men whom one never saw alone, either always in groups or with one favoured wingman. There was no other escape from thought - but escape.

Julian mistrusted his own reflections. On the surface protective camouflage was easy; deeper down there was no map to the terrain so he left them alone, undisturbed. _Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought_ summed it up only too well.

***

On the appointed day he thought little. It was bitterly cold; he turned up the collar of his makeshift German uniform, thanking the gods for this small extra concealment. 

He waited for Karl to make his rounds of the compound and then, when Karl had been delayed by a sympathetic fellow prisoner, he set off himself upon the final stretch. He had put a few stones in the shoe to help with the limp but in the end they seemed superfluous. He walked down the main street of the compound imagining himself into the role: hungry and tired and cold, harassed by the prisoners' childish tricks, sick to death of the war and haunted always by the prospect of the Eastern Front. His mother was ill and there was no coal being delivered any more; he would have to walk four miles home and chop firewood before he could rest. He envied bitterly the black marketeers among the guards but he hadn't the courage; if he were gone his mother would starve.

Julian was so lost in Karl's reflections that he barely noticed the arch of the main gate passing overhead. Belatedly, he glanced up and waved to the guards in the tower. Later on his prison comrades would call this cheek, but it was no more than Karl did every day. Therefore he had never thought of omitting it.

Being outside the fence for the first time in six months was almost dizzying. He expected shouts and alarms and a hail of bullets but there was nothing but the rutted road and the pine boughs. He stumped along, forcing himself to maintain the same unvarying pace. Half the disorientation was how normal it felt, how one could suddenly walk through into another world and feel nothing but the same bite of wind on one's face.

He was free, so far as freedom could be reckoned.

He had gone from school and university straight back to Larch Hill, and thence to the RAF and into captivity. It was possible that he was now as free as he ever had been - but this was too interesting a thought to be entertained. He scratched himself as Karl would have scratched himself. Oddly reassured by the action, he walked onwards.

If he were to keep up the role his next destination would be Karl's home, and yet he had not the slightest idea where it was. This blank in his knowledge bothered him, as if his own identity were fraying the further he got from the gate, falling to pieces and leaving him with nothing.

Julian himself was bound for the village train station, less than a mile from the gates of the camp. This he knew, in as much detail as the previous escapees could convey. Tucked in a pocket of his makeshift uniform were his forged identity papers and Reichsmarks, and tucked around his neck, inside shirt and scarf, was a silk map of Germany which had been smuggled into the camp in a food parcel. He was meant to take the train to the border of Switzerland and then simply walk across it. In all of this he had been instructed; unlike his impersonation, upon which he had focused, it had not been open for discussion - and as a consequence it had never seemed truly real. Now it was real.

_Shot while attempting escape._

He tried the feel of it on his tongue, then stopped short when he saw a horse-cart in the distance and realised that he had spoken in English. 

In any language it tasted of lead and cold, the tang of burial far from home. A feeling of hideous impermanence swept over him, a stranger who deserved the name of Fleming no more than the name on his forged documents. He wished abruptly that he had given Hilary a child, something to testify his existence when he was gone, but even _in extremis_ he realised that she might not have felt the same.

Once upon a time he had believed that to be shot while attempting escape would be a noble end. Now it seemed hideous beyond belief and for the first time in his life he thought himself a coward.

Nonetheless he mechanically went about the plan as it had been arranged. Once the horse-cart was out of view, taking care that he was unobserved, he walked off the road and into the forest. Not so far that he would lose his sense of direction; just far enough that the pine boughs screened him from view. There he quickly stripped off his counterfeit German uniform, shivering at the sudden shock of cold air against his bare skin, and replaced it with a set of equally counterfeit workman's clothes which had been cunningly concealed about his greatcoat. Another role to be taken on.

He hid the uniform under a thorn bush - thinking of the days of work that had gone into making it, only to be abandoned so - and, heart pounding, quickly rejoined the road once again.

The train station, on the outskirts of the village, was a tiny place. It reminded him ineluctably of Lynchwick Halt and he knew very well the comment that an unknown traveler would have excited there. Perhaps it was different in wartime. In any case the Escape Committee had arranged it so that he would arrive only fifteen minutes before the local, so that he would not long be exposed to scrutiny. He hoped it would be enough.

Inside the station was dingy, its floor tiles ornately patterned in Art Nouveau style, but it seemed as though they had not had a good scrubbing in a long while. Along two walls there were wooden benches running the length of the room; to his left there was a fireplace, emptied of both wood and irons. To his right there was a ticket office, with a bewhiskered man sitting drowsily in the window.

Julian went up straightaway, knowing that - no less than during his escape from the camp itself - to hesitate was to be lost. In German learnt almost by rote, with - if he had imitated his tutor well enough - a heavy admixture of Polish intonation, he asked for a third class ticket to Dresden. The stationmaster grunted, glanced under heavy eyelids at Julian's papers. Twilight was beginning to fall outside and there was not so much to see. Julian, self-conscious of the whiteness and fineness of his hands, buried them in the pockets of his coat. He did not look like a Polish labourer, not if anyone looked closely. But it was late in the day and the railway functionary was not inclined to look.

He thrust the papers back across the counter at Julian, muttered something which ended in a disgusted clearing of the throat. Of the scattered sentences Julian caught only _two_ and _cold_. In reply he nodded understandingly, shook his head in mild sadness - for it seemed to be indicated - and took his papers quickly back.

Julian chose a bench as far from the ticket office and the door as possible, facing away from the door and towards the platform. He tipped his hat down over his eyes and did his best to look like a tired, unassuming guest worker. The only other passengers in the station were an old peasant couple, already beginning to drowse over their piled baggage.

Ten minutes... his heart began to beat even faster with the thought that perhaps, perhaps, it might just come off after all.

Then his subconscious mind caught up with the stationmaster's German. _Two hours... the snow and cold._ The train was delayed.

He dared not pace; there was nothing he could do. For a moment he thought of getting up and walking out into the cold, walking away into Germany, but he knew that it would be a fool's errand. He was not prepared, not dressed for it - and he was alone. 

If Hilary had been with him he might have been capable of anything. But she was not - he would not wish her so - and even if she had been there she would have said that the only rational thing to do was to stay put.

He stayed in his place on the hard bench, imagining himself on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds, required to convince them all that he was fast asleep. It was this idea that helped him to slow his breathing to a manageable rate. He imagined Hilary running her hands through his hair, and his heart rate began to slow as well. It might still work. Perhaps everyone in Germany was too tired to care. Perhaps his friends in the camp would manage to keep him from being missed at the evening roll call.

He spent more than an hour in painfully suspended animation, feeling his legs begin to fall asleep as the edge of the bench cut into them. He himself only feigned rest, every sense alert.

He heard the heavy, booted footsteps even before the door opened. There was a wash of cold air; Julian fought to keep his eyes closed, to keep his eyelids from fluttering too visibly. He expected the crack of a bullet, to be shot where he sat. He could not bear the thought of dying with his eyes closed, but he could not allow himself to break role now.

There was no bullet. Only the footsteps of one man alone. He was buying a ticket, making bantering conversation with the guard. _Late_ was the only word Julian could catch. _Always late._

Although there was no shortage of space on the benches, the man sat down close by Julian's side. The hairs on the back of Julian's neck stood up at the sense of proximity; it did not require sight.

The man said something Julian could not make out. He allowed himself to blink now, to slowly open his eyes. The man repeated his comment, elbowed Julian in the ribs, roughly but not unkindly. He was a young soldier, solid, smiling at whatever it was he had said. His face was unfamiliar to Julian from the camp; probably he had been home on leave and was just in want of a little conversation while waiting for the train.

Only there was no way for Julian to provide it. He fumbled for another of his painstakingly learnt phrases. _I only speak a little German,_ he said, as a Pole might say it. _I'm sorry._

For a moment he thought that he might get away with it. The young soldier's face moved quickly through incomprehension and disappointment to a dawning suspicion. He said something else to which Julian could make no reply. Across the waiting room the peasant couple were wide awake now, watching with keen interest.

_Engländer_ , said the soldier. _Engländer._

And with that it was all up. The guards from the camp arrived for him not fifteen minutes later.

Though he made a token protest at the drawn rifles, all he could feel while being led back to the compound was a sense of relief, like a dog being brought back to the kennels after a long day off the lead. He had made an honourable attempt at escape and the lack of success was hardly his fault.

One week in the cooler. Solitary confinement. His cell was cold and the food was meagre without the benefit of Red Cross parcels, but the very deprivation was reassuring in its certainty. Outside the snow was coming down fast now.

A few days into his punishment - he had lost track - he was brought to see the commandant, who spoke to him more in sorrow than in anger. He wished that Julian had not tried to escape: it was no game, but a serious matter, one which ought not to be undertaken lightly. The Luftwaffe did everything possible to make their prisoners comfortable, did they not? Why then had he tried to escape? It could only endanger him and his comrades. The punishment Julian had received was a token one, because this was Julian's first attempt, and because he had no doubt been led astray - but he should be aware that if he tried again, the consequences would be much more severe.

Julian took this all serenely. He felt no guilt; on both their sides it was no more than a playing of parts.

"Karl," said the commandant finally, "has been disciplined. His inattention was inexcusable. He is being sent to the front."

There was no need to specify which front. Julian rose to his feet and took his leave, the interview at an end, and went back to his cell.

He felt as if he had been executed by proxy. Karl had done nothing wrong besides being delayed on his rounds by ten minutes. It was not his fault that Julian had become his _doppleganger_. But he had not gone home to his mother that day that Julian had walked out of the camp gates and now it seemed likely that he never would.

Julian's whole being revolted at the thought of it. His own death would have been a fitting punishment, but he had never imagined that others would suffer for his sport.

"Bad luck," said Parkhurst when Julian was released back into the barracks. "If the train had been on time you might have made it. Still, it did the heart good to see you waving goodbye as you walked through the gate. What cheek! Like you owned the place. Ready to try again?"

"I don't want to try again," said Julian. "I'm done with that."

And he sat down immediately to write a letter to Hilary, asking her to visit his mother and send his love.


	4. Chapter 4

Robbed of the anodyne of escape, Julian had to find some other way of filling his days. 

He thought for a while of feigning madness. Some other prisoners had successfully achieved repatriation to England via this method. One man whom everyone had thought sincerely insane had upon his return, or so the story was told, sent a postcard to the camp which said simply, _who's crazy now?_ Julian thought, without pride, that he might be able to pull it off. But the prospect terrified him. He could slide into madness as one slid under the comforting warmth of an eiderdown duvet, reuniting himself with Hilary in his dreams, and never emerge again. He felt it occasionally plucking at his sleeve and knew that it would only be half acting.

With escape and madness barred, he was left only the theatre.

Finer by far than the Lynchwick Village Hall, the camp theatre would have been the envy of many English market towns. Constructed in the early days before Julian's arrival, it seated several hundred people; though its sets and lighting were jury-rigged and supplied largely through petty theft, it had aspirations of grandeur and largely fulfilled them. It ran to a professional schedule, with productions onstage every night for a week and another two simultaneously in rehearsal. It had a manager who had professionally run a small theatre in Exeter before enlisting in the RAF and its star roles were mostly taken by actors with experience in provincial rep or in small parts on the West End.

Julian had attended their shows whenever he could get tickets - not more than once or twice in the month, for full houses were the rule - and thought them good on the whole, even if he always spent most of the next day discussing the fine points with anyone who would listen. He had considered beginning to act directly after his capture, but had fought shy of the idea for a while, telling himself that he ought not to allow himself to ignore the hard realities of camp life. Only one could see how well that had worked.

Finally he presented himself at an open casting call, feeling a good deal more diffident than he had ever felt at Cuppers. Almost more than his escape attempt it gave him the sense of crossing a Rubicon. He never had called Finnegan - to Hilary's extreme displeasure - and therefore this semi-pro company was as close as he had come to the real life of the theatre. No doubt after the war these men would be returning to their acting careers, and he - one hardly knew.

Despite his nerves - and a good dose of his usual self-consciousness at acting a 'straight' part - he found himself with a part as a waiter in the frothy farce that would be staged two weeks hence. It was all that had been offered him.

He decided to take the part and began rehearsals, resolving to become an unexceptional, reliable actor, giving no reason to be singled out either for praise or blame. For a time he believed himself to be succeeding. Many of the cast knew one another already, either from the camp or, in many cases, from their careers before the war. It was what his mother would call a 'socially mixed' company; onstage, accents had a practiced note, and slipped to become noticeably demotic in the dressing room. It was mixed in other ways, too, familiar to anyone who had ever moved in theatrical circles.

"You are an interesting boy, aren't you?" said Bryce, one of the leading lights, while they were cleaning off their makeup after the third performance. "And you're better than you let on. I wonder why? You've certainly acted before."

"At school," admitted Julian, hoping that this would be enough of an answer.

"And...?"

"And in OUDS. But I was never the leading man type."

"You certainly look the leading man type to me, my dear. Now, let's see, have I seen you in anything?"

Julian could hardly imagine Bryce at Oxford, and therefore he thought it unlikely, but he stopped himself saying this. Bryce had the traces of a Birmingham accent, which occasionally came through in the dressing room but never on stage, and a scrappy early life which was discernible more through what he did not say than through what he did. Without firm evidence Julian suspected that Bryce was illegitimate, and for this reason felt with him a curious kinship that he never could have brought himself to explain. 

"One hardly knows," said Julian evasively, wiping off his eyes and lashes with a strikingly dirty sponge, while thinking it a miracle that there was a sponge at all.

"Why are you smiling?"

"Am I?"

"Very much so."

Bryce studied him in the small mirror that they were sharing. His own features were more irregular than striking; he had sandy hair, expressive blue eyes and a prominent, irregular nose along with a sprinkling of scars on his cheeks from adolescent acne. It was his looks, Bryce declared, that had kept him out of the West End, but he did not really seem to believe this himself - and Julian would happily have swapped with him.

"My wife came to see me in a play once. An amateur thing, hardly worth mentioning, and I thought at the time it was only out of pity. It probably was. She wasn't my wife then. This was before - well, before everything. Only I rather imposed myself on her afterwards, and she said something about my being presentable but not respectable because I hadn't managed to get the mascara off. I've thought of it as mascara ever since."

"Oh dear, was she terribly shocked?" asked Bryce. 

His expressive face mimed sympathy - from Julian's point of view rather misplaced.

"She's not easily shocked," said Julian. "She's a doctor; a surgeon. Actually she rather seemed to like it."

Bryce grasped at his upper arm companionably, but firmly, and changed the subject. "You haven't said what you played in at OUDS. Do tell."

Thinking this was more effective than the interrogation he had resisted at Dulag Luft, Julian began to run through his catalogue of roles. When he got to Oberon he was brought up short by a thoughtful gasp from Bryce.

"So that was it after all. Well, well, you _are_ being wasted. And why haven't I seen you in anything since?"

A whole list of answers was possible here, but Julian simply smiled and said: "You have now."

"But that doesn't count, darling. You know it doesn't." He released Julian's arm and settled back in the rickety chair. "Let me make you a proposition. We're doing _Hamlet_ in a couple of months, if we can get things sorted. Renting costumes from Berlin, the whole catastrophe, a proper serious production. People think they want frothy revues every week, but one can't always get what one wants. They should feel gratified that we're giving them anything at all. Developing their minds."

He sketched a delicate gesture of condescension, coming oddly from a man who had almost certainly left school at fourteen.

"I'd rather not play Hamlet," said Julian, whom in recent months had begun wondering whether he was not in fact finally old enough to play Hamlet. 

He had a vision of being reluctantly prevailed upon, of choosing to rise above his aversion to straight parts for the good of all. Even his mother might understand the need to... well, perhaps 'keeping up morale' would not be precisely accurate.

"Oh no," said Bryce. "You'd be stabbed through the arras if you tried to take that away from Fallon. It's the female roles that are the trouble in this place. I wondered whether you fancied the idea of Ophelia."

Julian blinked. "Wouldn't you rather someone younger? I mean, it's an easier thing to do at eighteen than twenty-eight, even with the best stage makeup, which we haven't got."

"But that's the thing, Fleming," said Bryce, leaning forward. "A female impersonator is just what we don't want. They're two a penny in here - and well and good for the variety shows, but I want someone who'll play it as a straight part. Someone, in short, who can actually act."

"Well, I don't know if I'm any good at playing women. One does it in school, obviously..."

Bryce chuckled. "Not in my school, duckie."

It was not quite a straight part, was it? Julian pondered. He had not played a female role since he was fifteen and in the fifth; after going through the _Tempest_ as an overly tall Miranda - having hoped for Caliban, he had sulked rather - he had graduated to male roles. But he thought more of the challenge now than he had done then, when it had seemed merely an indignity to be outgrown in time, as one outgrew fagging and the unwelcome devotion of older boys. 

"One could make it clear that it wasn't meant to be realistic," he mused. "Something stylised, rather like a Japanese _noh_ play? More a robe than a dress, although the long hair would be interesting. I would certainly want to do it with long hair."

"So you'll take it? Or are you going to ask to produce too?"

"I wouldn't say no to producing," said Julian hopefully.

No one, however, asked him to produce. It was Bryce who took the role of producer/director; Julian ought to have guessed from the start. The costumes hired at great expense from the Deutsches Theater - one wondered that it had ever been allowed, or that prisoners of war were able to cobble together the funds to pay for it - were not in the least stylised. Julian was dressed most properly and predictably as a Renaissance noblewoman, all in white, with a flowing blonde wig. Once he had got used to this he found that he did not much mind; though he would have preferred his own hair, there was hardly the time to grow it out.

Rehearsals began a fortnight before opening night. It was a decent company; Fallon, who had bagged Hamlet, had toured in the States. Their Claudius had been in rep since before the previous war and had acted opposite Ellen Terry. Rather superannuated for the RAF, he had been captured during the retreat to Dunkirk; rumour had it that he had enlisted to escape certain pressing financial obligations, though his theatrical compatriots would never have enquired into the details. Their Laertes, a young man barely out of school, was nice rather than good, but his fencing was excellent and it was this which had recommended him for the role.

It was Julian who was the fly in the ointment. Bryce jollied him along, affecting to believe that he was suffering from no more than nerves in his first major role, but Julian knew it was more than that. Despite the sumptuous costumes he remained painfully conscious of the bareness of his face. One might have thought that his beauty would be of less import when performing for an exclusively male audience, but Julian was not such a fool as to believe that. He wished fruitlessly that he had been born in ancient Greece, where he could have acted behind a mask, fittingly drawing the audience's attention through his skill rather than his form.

Under other circumstances he might have avoided this self-consciousness by submerging himself in Ophelia's madness, drowning himself in those comforting depths, but the thought was too raw, and the undertow too great. It was not the same as playing one of the camp guards. He could not imagine it; he did not want to.

"Duckie, I _know_ you're better than this," complained Bryce one evening.

Rehearsals had stumbled to a close ten minutes earlier. Most of the other actors had gone. The only men remaining in the hall were bent upon escape rather than artistic triumph; the space under the seats of the camp theatre did double duty as a venue for the disposal of sand from various excavations, and they were busily occupied with filling it in.

"I wouldn't be so certain," said Julian. "Really I'm mostly a pretty face."

He combed his fingers through the long blonde wig, wondering what had happened to the German peasant girl whom had sold her hair to make it. Decades ago perhaps, not long after the last war. He wondered whether the costumes would be fumigated for lice before they were sent back to Berlin.

Bryce shook his head dismissively. "Don't make me laugh, all that sighing and carrying on. And you're still too stiff; you look every inch of six feet when you move like that."

Moving like a woman was a necessity, the very first thing of which a cross-dressed actor should think. Julian had thought of it; of course he had. He had begun with Hilary, the woman whom he knew best. Though he had derived comfort in the resulting sense of living inside her, he had soon realised - wondering why it had not occurred to him before - that a brisk surgeon in her late thirties had little in common with a frightened girl in her teens apart from their sex. After that he had gone rather adrift and had clearly not yet found his footing.

"Maybe you need motivation." 

Julian made a face but Bryce continued regardless.

"She could have one on the way, there's a thought. Seen it before - but I don't suppose you've acted opposite women much? Well, it happens all the time in rep. She thinks she's met the perfect chap and then, when the chips are down, he won't propose. Or he's married already. That's a classic. There was a girl I knew in Scarborough, the fellow was something in the council with a wife and four kids, in the end I had to go with her myself to have it taken care of because no one else would. Her family hadn't wanted her to go on the stage in the first place and they would have gone spare if... well, of course then people thought I was the father. It would have been funny if it wasn't so awful. But the story has a happy ending, she's with the Birmingham Rep now. Or she was when I last heard. War is the devil, isn't it?"

Little of this touching tale penetrated Julian's consciousness. Naturally he had encountered the interpretation that Ophelia was carrying Hamlet's child; one had not needed to read English at Oxford to perceive that much. It was an idea that he had always found distasteful, and therefore ignored, but now Bryce's words had twitched a thread in his mind and he could not help but follow.

_Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?_

One supposed that his own mother had asked herself the same question when she found herself expecting him. There the resemblance ended, for she had lived; he often wondered, now, whether she had sometimes wished it had been otherwise.

He wondered abruptly why he had ever wanted to play Hamlet. Like father, like son, one supposed. And was that not the point? He shuddered.

"All right, Fleming?"

"Just a bit chilly in here," said Julian, willing himself to insouciance. "You're right, of course, about Ophelia I mean. I'll go away and have a think about it. I'm sorry; you have better things to do than worry about my poor acting."

Bryce seemed amused. "But darling, that's what a director is _for_."

In his voice there had been a trace of sympathy beneath the amusement but, if he wondered what was going through Julian's mind, he did not ask. Such were the small courtesies necessary to the cloistered life of a prisoner of war camp.

Julian got up from where he had been sitting cross-legged on the edge of the stage. He stretched - more showily than he had intended, apparently, for there was an ironic whistle from one of the escape committee at the back of the hall. Acting upon instinct, he folded at the waist and executed a deep bow. His mother would have been horrified at his exhibitionism. He was, frankly, himself - if not perhaps as much as he ought to be.

"I'm going for a walk," he said to Bryce in an undertone. "Thanks."

***

Opening night was always a full house; every night was a full house in Stalag Luft. But the premiere of a serious play like _Hamlet_ was an unquestionable event.

The camp staff had their places in the front row, as they always did. A few SS officers from the area had come in to see the show; there were bitter complaints about queue-jumping amongst the prisoners, but there was nothing that could be done. 

"Krauts bloody love Shakespeare," said Fallon backstage. "If I had my way, I'd show them..."

His gesture was one which would never have been allowed onstage by the Lord Chamberlain.

Once the curtain was about to rise, however, the English and Germans together became one entity in the eyes of the actors - the audience, any audience. The buzz of excitement would have been the same in whatever language it had been conducted. They forgot their surrounding; they forgot themselves. Such was the mysterious alchemy that was conducted six nights a week in Stalag Luft, plus Saturday matinees. It would have taken place just the same whether it had been put on in Abingdon or Lynchwick, or indeed in Berlin.

Julian had worried for days that his performance would be a betrayal. He felt it still. The story was not his to tell - he, who had been no more than the child curled _in potentia_ within the womb. He should not presume to know... Ophelia, his mother, any woman. Being a man was, after all, something about which very little could be done, or so one was told. But the feeling of sympathy that had risen up inside him could not be denied; without this to draw upon, he would have had nothing. So he did as his nature demanded and followed the leadings of the muse.

It was a good performance, if not a great one. Julian knew full well that he had not achieved that true self-forgetfulness which, for him, was the only measure of real success. When he went backstage with the applause still ringing in his ears, he knew that any actor playing a woman who possessed both beauty and relative youth would have been judged with equal kindness. But Bryce was pleased, and there were six performances in which to improve - these were, after all, the important things.

In camp there was nothing like the first-night parties that Julian had known at Oxford, only a few cigarettes shared between the actors before they returned to barracks for curfew. Standing outside at the back of the theatre, smoking a borrowed Player, Julian watched the sunset over the pines tingeing scrappy, torn clouds with pink. He thought longingly of Hilary waiting to drive him home, of _her_ cigarettes, which had tasted sweeter than any champagne, of how she had laughed over his 'mascara.' (It had been liner only; though he had not said so then, his eyelashes, shamefully, had been entirely his own). Of how, after seeing an indifferent performance in a draughty village hall, she had been miraculously willing to take him in, feed him, and stroke his hair until he could have wept from love. He could have wept now, for thinking of it.

A few hours, a few days, the demands of the play had brought him forgetfulness. Now he felt none of his usual giddiness after a first night, for his longings for Hilary had returned, more forceful for the interval. He was a worshipper barred from pilgrimage; his devotions must of necessity be solitary. He knew she would forgive him this, for she forgave everything. Only he was not certain that he could bear it.

"Sunsets are much better at altitude," said Bryce. And then, getting no reply: "You look a thousand miles away, Fleming."

"Only about six hundred."

The look that Bryce gave him in reply was an eloquent one. Julian wished that he had saved it for the stage. It reminded him too strongly of another first night, long before he had met Hilary.

"I'm sorry." It seemed that he was always saying 'sorry' to Bryce. But then it was a familiar state of being.

Bryce shook his head. "Who isn't thinking about it? We all are."

Julian choked off another apology.

"Excellent first night," added Bryce, though he had said it before. "Where on Earth did that come from, Fleming? Exactly what I was talking about, as it happens. And of course you had to leave me hanging and pull it out at the last minute."

"I only just thought of it. I don't think I can explain any more, it wouldn't make any sense." Julian paused. "But look, do call me Julian. We know each other well enough by now, wouldn't you think? And it's not school, after all."

"Not at all. Call me Mark. If you like." 

Bryce - one could not quite think of him as Mark - gazed at him, reached out to put a hand to the small of Julian's back. At first it seemed it might only be a companionable touch; then it lingered, grasped, gently pulled Julian closer. 

Still gripped by the slight unreality of the theatre, Julian reacted according to instinct. Tentatively, experimentally, he laid his head against Bryce's shoulder. For a moment they seemed to remain suspended. Anything might happen in the pause between one heartbeat and the next. Julian wondered whether Bryce would reach up to stroke his hair.

But the moment passed without being seized. It was all wrong, subtly wrong, everything about it. The scent of greasepaint and the wrong cigarettes; his height, which matched Julian's own; the uneven sound of his breathing.

Julian straightened up and took a step away, attempting not to shiver in sudden unease. Bryce was not Hilary; it was not his fault, but there was no getting around it. 

"Forget that," said Bryce immediately. "Silly of me. I wouldn't like you to think I'm dim enough to imagine that I'm your type."

Julian pondered for a moment. "I wouldn't say that you're not." This double negative seemed damning with faint praise, apart from being bad form. "But it's just a thing that happens on first nights, isn't it?"

Bryce appeared dubious.

"There was a chap at school," Julian continued, "two years older than me. He was Hotspur and I was Hal; I was in the fifth then..."

An ironic chuckle. "Oh yes. And what happened?"

"Well, I hit him. But only really because he took me by surprise. I've regretted it ever since. He wasn't that sort of chap."

"The sort of chap who propositions a fifth-former after the school play?"

Julian had never considered it in quite this light. "Well..."

"But I don't suppose you've ever wished you'd taken him up on it."

"No."

"Why?"

For this question Julian had a ready answer. "Because I didn't love him. I only liked him extremely."

There was a long silence.

"Of course," said Bryce slowly. "You didn't love him."

"Yes," said Julian, relieved to have been understood at last. "What else is there, after all?"

Bryce kicked at the hard-packed earth with the toe of his boot and walked away.


	5. Chapter 5

What would Hilary have said? Though Julian dearly wished he knew, it was hardly a question one could put into the letters home. He spent hours in his bunk the following day agonising over a few meagre scraps of news about the production - he had never before found himself lost for words about the theatre - and all he could muster for the close was a rather forced request that Hilary, if she could find any makeup to spare, should send it in the next parcel.

He sat holding the folded writing paper, hoping that by some miracle the thought of her would be enough to imbue the letter with all the longings that he could not express. She would know, wouldn't she? She had to; after all, she always understood.

Sighing, he tucked the letter away under his pillow. One more day would make no difference. Perhaps inspiration would strike in the morning.

"I say, Fleming, everyone's talking about this play of yours."

From the note of irritation in Parkhurst's voice it was not the first time he had said this. Nor even perhaps the second. He stood by Julian's bunk - not an uncommon occurrence, since his own bunk was just above, but it was clear that he was not passing by chance.

Julian paused another moment before responding. It was difficult to muster the appropriate note of unconcern. "Oh?"

"Not what you want to be known for around here."

This was not quite what he had expected; it required a different note, complete bemusement. That was not difficult to muster. " _Hamlet_?"

"Come off the act, you know what I mean. Hanging about with that crowd is bad enough in the first place. Everyone knows about Bryce. But if you're got up like a girl as well... People are going to make assumptions."

"People always do," said Julian. "Whatever one does."

"Well, you can do something about it."

Parkhurst spoke in his most clipped tone, as though he were chastising an underling or a servant for having neglected an obvious duty. He had not been put off by the deflection nor fooled by the protective colouration with which Julian usually so successfully concealed himself.

Julian's first instinct was to continue to pretend that he had no idea what Parkhurst meant. His second was to apologise, to throw himself upon the mercy of a man upon whom, after all, much of his comfort and social standing in the camp depended. Such had been the habits of a lifetime: to be vacantly agreeable and, if that failed, to be abject. But then his mother had never been mollified by that either.

"Perhaps I don't care to do anything about it," said Julian, putting on an air of aristocratic superiority calculated to infuriate, for he knew he was hardly aristocratic as Parkhurst and his friends would measure it. "Perhaps I prefer their company."

"If that's the line you're going to take, then there's nothing I can do for you."

It was a tone only too familiar - _her_ tone. He had been cast into the outer darkness; henceforth he did not exist. He was finished.

Warily examining his emotions, he was shocked to discover that all he felt was relief.

"Go to hell," said Julian Fleming.

***

Julian curled on his side in bed, shivering slightly under the thin blanket, for the brazier was a long way away. Bed bugs plucked at his skin and there was a raucous card game going on at the other end of the hut, but he ignored it all. So too he ignored the memory of the confrontation with Parkhurst, which could hardly matter now. He was thinking of Hilary, an appointment which he kept as faithfully every evening as if he were going home to sleep beside her.

Physical desire had ebbed away from him some time ago, almost un-regretted. He had long retained a schoolboyish sense of guilt over masturbation, which had not been assuaged by his perusal of the pages of _Married Love_. Hilary, incredulously, had declared it perfectly natural, but Hilary's definition of the natural and his own often failed to coincide; in any case, it had felt even more of a sin when compared with the self-evident joys of marital union - in any of its varied forms.

Now, exhausted and hungry, all that was left of him was love. But love was all he wanted.

His imagination was a stage upon which he produced and directed a one-woman play. What would Hilary be doing at that moment? He did his best to imagine her coming home late from work: tired, still absorbed in thought, kicking off her shoes, making a cup of tea. Would she be thinking of him? He directed her to pick up an old letter. She sighed, rubbing absentmindedly at her bare arm with one hand. Her nails were cut sensibly short, unpolished. He could envision every detail: the scattering of freckles on her forearm, the small, round scar of her smallpox vaccine.

He crept into the scene, a revenant ghost apologetic for its presence. Unobtrusively he took his accustomed place on the rug at her feet, laying his cheek in mute supplication against her thigh. Hilary hardly seemed to notice him, only reached out her hand to ruffle his hair, lost in her own thoughts. 

For a moment Julian wondered whether it might be a true vision. Though he supposed it was rather pagan, he did, instinctively, believe in the possibility: that Hilary's dreams and his own, amplified by longing, might merge into one whole so that finally, in spirit, they would be undivided.

So at least his imagining of Hilary shifted insensibly from the real woman to the goddess, with whom he felt - or thought he had felt, until the moment when death seemed to be upon him - an indissoluble spiritual bond. He prayed to her, or to her whom she symbolised, as an intercessor, that she should not turn her face away from him in the hour of his need.

His belief had for many years been an inchoate, half-apologetic, typically Church of England thing. When he was small his mother had taught the local Sunday school but he had only received the benefit of her teaching at home, not being allowed to mix socially with the rough Lynchwick boys. (He had mixed with them despite this, only in less supervised ways.) She had believed firmly in the Church of England, seemingly in the same way that she had believed in proper enunciation, maids who were seen and not heard, and the Women's Institute; she had attended church faithfully every Sunday, and Evensong as well. She likely had never dreamt of doing otherwise.

He had never had access to her internal being, so if it was more than that - if it were fed by sincere belief - he did not and would never know. With his mother everything was on the surface, a matter of correct - performance.

The word occurred to him in connection with his mother for the first time in his life and he began to laugh, lying there curled in his chilly, bug-infested camp bed.

"Fleming, you all right?"

It was the voice of Parkhurst from the top bunk. It had nothing in it of concern, only a cold annoyance at being disturbed which was edged with perceptible disdain.

"Perfectly fine," said Julian, schooling his voice to calm. "I just thought of something funny."

"As long as you're not cracking up."

But it made perfect sense, once one thought it through. He was only amazed that he had not considered it before. All her life had been a sort of performance, an attempt to conceal the accident of her first marriage and his own birth, to conceal everything that he represented and everything that he had inherited.

No wonder she had rejected his every effort to direct his own life. No wonder that she so detested Hilary's blunt, unpretending matter-of-factness.

_Motto: I don't see why not._

He nearly started to laugh again and then suppressed it. Perhaps he was cracking up after all. Or perhaps he had been cracked already. An egg addled from the moment of its laying.

Yes, he was laughing now, definitely. There was no helping it.

Hilary would not have minded. There was no false seriousness between them. In bed together they nuzzled, tickled, aimlessly caressed, found themselves giggling at the most inappropriate of moments. Improvised from beginning to end under Hilary's loving tutelage. She would not have minded him laughing. She would only have kissed his forehead and lightly whispered that he was an absurd boy.

Abruptly Julian realised that he was not laughing, but crying.

"You _are_ cracking up," drawled Parkhurst. "I knew it."

One could not reply decently to a statement like this, for the simple reason that it was not a decent observation to have made in the first place. Julian, with a correctness of which his mother would approved, ignored it. He dabbed at his eyes with the scratchy, unwashed blanket, took a few deep breaths as the fourth form had taught him, and smiled ironically - in the style of Hilary - at the ridiculousness of the world.

He sat up and slung his feet out of bed.

"I'm going for a walk," he said. "Don't wait up."

***

In retrospect, the statement had echoes of _I may be some time_. 

If Parkhurst had possessed any psychological astuteness he might have been concerned. But as it was Julian strolled unchallenged out into the early winter evening, whereupon the brilliance of the moonlight drove every thought of despair out of his mind. He marvelled at the starkness of the branches shadowed on the snow, thinking of lighting and stage sets, and strolled with a pleasant lack of need for thought towards Bryce's cabin.

Architecturally speaking it was precisely the same as Julian's own, just two across and one along. Inside it had the same close fug of cigarette smoke and men in close proximity, a scent which had grown almost homely with time. Yet though the scene differed only in small things - a crochet blanket here, a camp-made teapot there - the feeling was, for Julian at least, completely changed.

A red-headed man glanced up with incurious acceptance as he came in. "Bryce," he called, "your winger's here."

"Over here," came Bryce's voice from a corner. "Won't be a minute."

Julian, circling the group of men sat round the brazier, found Bryce leaning intently over a little improvised immersion heater, doing something to a bit of wire.

He settled on a stool, rubbing his hands together for warmth. "Lighting's very useful, isn't it?"

"Oh no." Bryce did not look up. "Rigging lights came afterwards. Learned this at work."

"I thought you sold motorcars?"

"Before that I worked in a bicycle shop."

Julian made a noise of polite puzzlement.

Bryce looked up and smiled. "Bike lights. Dynamos. Besides, who hasn't played with a radio? Right, I think that's sorted out."

It had never occurred to Julian to play with the radio as a boy, any more than he would have tinkered with the workings of the grandfather clock. It worked - someone came to fix it if it did not - and beyond that there was no reason to enquire. While at university he had discovered, to his immense surprise, that he was equally capable of keeping his MG running and comprehending the maintenance requirements of a temperamental aeroplane, but these skills had never seemed applicable within the domestic sphere, and certainly not to an eventual career. He did not say this.

"What are you doing here anyway? Curfew's in forty minutes."

This was not uttered in a tone of reproach but only with mild, matey curiosity.

"Oh, I wanted to get out of my barracks for a bit. I can never seem to breathe in there."

"Grubby lot, aren't they?"

One of the men at the brazier laughed, overhearing this. Julian's barrack-mates were mainly fellow Old Marcastrians, with a sprinkling of Etonians and Harrovians, whereas Bryce's neighbours were more socially mixed; a high proportion were what might be called 'temporary gentleman.' One presumed that this arrangement had been intentional on the part of the camp authorities but one would never have asked, or been so ill-bred as to allude to it directly.

"They don't like me much."

This realisation, which had dawned slowly, had come as a surprise; at school he had been generally well-liked.

"Well, the feeling's mutual, isn't it? Besides, you know you chucked in your social hopes with that lot when you fell in with... well, this lot." He added an aside, delivered in a passable tenor voice: " _Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington..._ "

"I acted at Marchester. We all did. And they can't expect me not to make other friends."

"Fleming, you can't really be that naive."

"No," said Julian slowly. 

From the start he had seen that the Marcastrians all went about together, but it had hardly struck him as odd, for he had been one of them. One might still say that it was simply a matter of prior acquaintance but... no, he was not that naive. Not now. 

He might have begun, straightforwardly, with an account of his confrontation with Parkhurst. Indeed he had half intended to do so, but it seemed to him now that it would profit him little, particularly when there were others who might overhear. Among other things, he did not think he could pretend, as Bryce had done, that Parkhurst's objection to Bryce was entirely on account of his class.

"But I do think it's very childish of them," was all he said in the end.

"Overgrown schoolboys," sniffed Bryce. 

The attention of the man at the brazier had been piqued by 'Mrs. Worthington'. 

"Give us a bit of a show, lads?" he asked hopefully, if not with much optimism.

Julian shook his head out of reflex, then regretted it. He could afford to be obliging; in another context his mother would have said that he had a duty. As for Hilary, she could have had only one reply: _I don't see why not_. He smiled at the thought.

Luckily their corner of the barracks was dark enough that no one had seen his gesture of demurral. He looked at Bryce. "Shall we? Something from _The Importance of Being Earnest_?"

It was their next production, still in rehearsal. Julian, having refused with just-concealed horror the role of Jack Worthing, had considered Cecily Cardew an escape of sorts.

"No," said Bryce. "Never. Bad luck. What we want is a bit more of a concert party number. Noel Coward, I was thinking."

Julian made a face. "You know I can't sing."

"Darling, neither can he."

"Come along now," said one of the men at the far side of the room.

"Well, I suppose," said Julian.

At Oxford he had taken part in the odd half-drunken sing-song - usually at the instigation of Lavenham, or that fellow James from Brasenose. It was all right to make oneself ridiculous among friends, as long as one avoided drawing attention to oneself. It would have been more notable to refuse. So he had stumbled gaily in company through _Patience_ and _Iolanthe_ with no feelings of guilt for his undergraduate folly, but he had never felt the urge to take them onto the stage. Serious theatre was his vocation; he had been taught to consider it close enough to frivolity that anything more overtly frivolous was unthinkable.

They began, with a cheekiness on Bryce's part which one could only assume was intentional, with 'Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans.' After that they tripped at a frightful pace through 'I've Been to a Marvellous Party,' overlapping and interrupted with laughter. Julian could hardly hope to match Bryce's facility with the patter - in fact he only got in the way - but did his best to make it up in the delivery. The men did not complain, but demanded more: 'Mrs. Worthington' followed.

For Julian, unaccustomed to singing, and still half-suffering from an autumn cold, this was a great deal of effort. His throat began to give out halfway through and he delivered the rest in mime. It was, he thought, probably an improvement.

"Another?" asked Bryce when they had done.

"No," said Julian, and was overcome by a fit of coughing. "But don't stop. You sing something."

After considering for a moment, Bryce began 'Mad About the Boy.'

He directed the song towards Julian, as was only proper. There were only the two of them; there was no one else to fill the role of the beloved. Now, as he had not done in university, Julian understood the virtue of simply doing what one was asked to do. Besides there was nothing to it other than standing still and looking vaguely like something out of Housman. This, sadly, was not difficult. So he did it.

More difficult was keeping the look of surprise off his face when Bryce continued with another verse which he had never heard:

" _No one but Dr Freud_  
Could have enjoyed  
The vexing dreams I've had about the boy

_When I told my wife  
She said she'd never heard such nonsense in her life..._ "

The other men hooted and clapped. Whether they were merely amused by the performance, or sensed the truth behind it, there was no way of telling. Love affairs were hardly unknown in camp, and no one with eyes to see could have been in any doubt of Bryce's preferences for his fellow man. It was not for show; it had every ring of reality. One only had to look into his eyes to see that.

_I could have loved him,_ thought Julian, _if I hadn't met her first._

He almost regretted that it had happened this way; he would have found it an unimaginable comfort to have someone in camp, to have everything one needed at home, within the compass of the barbed wire. But it was impossible now, whatever Hilary might say. Oddly the impossibility had nothing to do with Hilary's feelings; he knew that his own conscience, his own heart, would never be palliated. So there it was. 

Being still in love with one's wife was, after all, a thing about which nothing could be done.

" _Cos I'm absolutely,_ " concluded Bryce, " _mad about the boy._ "

He extended a hand to Julian and, to fervent applause, led him into a joint bow. It was obviously intended to signal the conclusion to the evening's entertainment.

As their small audience began to drift away, Bryce leaned confidentially towards him. "That wasn't so bad, was it?" 

"I quite enjoyed it," said Julian, surprised.

"You never know," Bryce replied, with an acerbic edge detectable under his usual matiness, "what else you might enjoy if you tried."

Julian's instinctive reaction came out of a treasury of childhood rebukes. "That was uncalled for."

"Aren't we proper. But it was perfectly called for; this is the real world, after all. Maybe you'll work it out someday."

There was nothing one could say to that. Julian only stared, feeling the hotness of betrayal. He had never expected this from Bryce.

Bryce shook his head. "Don't listen to me. I'm tired; I don't mean half the things I say. Look, curfew is in ten minutes. Hadn't you better run?"

_But you did mean it,_ he would have protested, if he had been speaking to Hilary. And she would have owned up to what she had said, to what she had meant, however unkind it might have been. Though her small unkindnesses were often intentional, and surgical in their precision, she always did own up; in the end they always understood one another.

"I had," he agreed, gazing at the implacable darkness waiting against the small windowpanes. "Yes, thanks, I would have forgotten. See you in rehearsal tomorrow."

And he made his exit.


	6. Chapter 6

Interlude: arrival of next-of-kin parcels

_Item: two lipsticks, both slightly used, and one eyeliner pencil, likewise._

Only after receiving the next parcel from Hilary did he realise that he ought to have thought of the wartime shortages before so blithely making his requests of her. Hilary had obviously sent her own lipstick; it was of a colour suiting her complexion rather than his own. As he had been intending to use them for theatrical productions, this hardly mattered, for his aim had never been to flatter his own looks. But he saved them scrupulously, not even allowing himself to use them for the dress rehearsal - and finally, at the bitter end, making up on opening night alone.

Usually he avoided the mirror backstage, except when its use became a necessity. Wearing Hilary's lipstick and liner he gazed into it, fascinated, thinking that perhaps he could somehow discern her lineaments echoed in his own.

_Item: one pair hand-knitted angora bedsocks._

These had without question been enclosed on his mother's behalf. In the rough, filthy atmosphere of a German camp they seemed absurdly incongruous, marooned in an alien and unsympathetic world, and he pitied them in their exile as he had never pitied himself. Julian, imagining his mother's beautiful hands knitting them - small, deft movements and the flash of her rings - shrank from profaning them by his touch. He tucked them away finally as a treasure to be used only _in extremis_ in the depths of winter.

He wondered whether Mrs. Pascoe's rabbits had endured the war against all odds or whether they had long ago ended up in a pie. He would much rather have had the pie but this was no doubt unfair to the rabbits, who had always been friendly to him during his visits to the farm - warm balls of absurdly soft fluff, pressing their quivering noses up against the wire in search of the clover he presented to them by way of penance for his wholesale extermination of their wild cousins.

He preferred ferrets. But one could not make bedsocks out of ferrets.

_Item: two packets of cigarettes_

He had benefitted from the cigarettes in the Red Cross parcels, having traded rather than smoked them. But Hilary's cigarettes were of the brand that she favoured, and always seemed to come imbued with the scent of sandalwood. He could not have been so unfeeling as to trade them away wholesale, and indeed could hardly bear to let slip the few which formed the necessary lubrication of trade. So he smoked them and thought of her, though he knew that it was pure sentimentality and that Hilary herself would have said they would be better traded for food.

_Item: two linen handkerchiefs embroidered at the corner with "JRF."_

His mother did not do embroidery. He could not imagine that Hilary did either; her steady hands and meticulous, even stitches were deployed in a different cause. Therefore these could only be the work of Lisa Clare. He felt he ought to appreciate the gesture but he could not; he knew that it had been done not for love of him, but for love of Hilary. He preferred not to reflect upon it.

_Item: one roll of medical gauze, strapping tape, tweezers, bandages, boric acid ointment and three vials of pills: sulfapyridine, diamorphine, phenobarbital, all labelled carefully in Hilary's own hand. " Not to be taken except under medical supervision."_

Julian had seen how meticulously Hilary guarded and inventoried the drugs in her dispensary. Long ago he had been unequivocally banned from touching anything in her Gloucestershire surgery without permission, and it was only upon sufferance that he was permitted to visit at all. He had never been allowed across the threshold of the dispensary.

From what little he knew about medicine these were some of the most powerful drugs in her arsenal and ordinarily she would never have delivered them into his hands except, accompanied by grave admonitions, under conditions of urgent necessity. This was, one supposed, just such an occasion.

On reflection he was surprised that they had been allowed through the hands of the Red Cross and thence into Germany. The vials of pills had been tucked into the socks for safekeeping and perhaps they had simply been missed. Or perhaps fate had guided them hither. One, to him, seemed as likely as the other.

To him they seemed a token of Hilary's love, an expression of her inward self in a way that none of the other items could be. She had once denied him entrance into her inner sanctum; now, she gave all. He knew perfectly well that they were things meant for practical use - this very practicality was part of their meaning - but as symbols they weighed with him more.

He tucked them carefully away, hoping that he would never have need to use them. Others might have need sooner - one ought, of course, to go to the camp's infirmary and give this small bounty to one of the doctors there - but for the moment he allowed the idea to slip his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the brief update; there will be a proper chapter next time.
> 
> In actuality it would have been almost impossible for Hilary to smuggle medication to Julian in a next-of-kin parcel. Even extra cigarettes, though paid for by family members, were shipped separately by the Red Cross. Still, dramatic license. Or, you know, fate.
> 
> A prisoner's next-of-kin was allowed to send them a quarterly parcel weighing up to ten pounds. Elaine would have had to route her own gifts through Hilary, giving her a very good reason to seek a rapprochement.
> 
>  
> 
> [Red Cross on WWII next-of-kin parcels](http://www.redcross.org.uk/~/media/BritishRedCross/Documents/About%20us/Second%20World%20War%20-%20Next%20of%20Kin.pdf)


	7. Chapter 7

There was no obvious break between himself and Bryce. None of their acquaintances or fellow actors could have had any inkling; the falling-off was almost imperceptible even to the two principals. They rehearsed together with the same zest and intensity as before, and the other actors complained just as bitterly that Bryce favoured Julian for all the plum parts. They strolled together sometimes in the early winter twilight, and Julian still occasionally visited the barracks to talk over questions of staging or to peer - as far as was possible in the troubled last months of 1944 - into the cloudy crystal ball of the future.

But an indefinable something had gone, the febrile intensity of a friendship that had trembled on the brink of more. A promised intimacy of feeling had evanesced into nothing, with a rapidity that left Julian convinced it had never meant anything in the first place.

He was, frankly, hurt. He had thought they were closer than that, to be pulled apart by... well, by anything as sordid and ridiculous as sex. If that was all the man wanted, surely it was better to have stayed away.

In this he did not reflect upon the fact that he himself had asked Hilary to sleep with him before proposing to her. Although the urgency he had felt was undeniable, he had confessed his love first, and received her own assurances in return; the lack of a proposal had been an oversight, which he had amended as soon as his attention had been drawn to it. He had assumed that she would understand the necessary consequences of his love - as it happened, she had not, but this he did not reflect upon either. He had found her; it was enough. He needed no other. Spiritually, at least. 

No man could be an island in camp. Surviving on what the authorities offered was just that - bare survival, no more. One needed an ally to share food, to watch one's back, to collude in all the small, essential expediencies of camp life. In this their bond was unquestioned because it was enforced by a more pressing need than that of the emotions.

Food had begun to grow scarcer in the last months of the year. The camp authorities said what they always said: that it was beyond their control; that they did, that they had always done, everything they could for the prisoners. But it was not enough, and it never had been. 

Without Red Cross parcels, eating the camp food alone, a man would die slowly by inches. The watery cabbage soup, lumpen dark bread adulterated (or so everyone swore) with sawdust, and the stinking, worm-infested lumps of cheese were not sufficient to keep body and soul together. The first men at camp had learned this only too well, for in the chaos after Dunkirk, with men being marched across Germany or transported like livestock in cattle cars by the tens of thousands, it had taken months for the first parcels to reach the camp, slashed new and raw out of the surrounding pine forest. Now it was happening again.

The Germans made few excuses, for to do so would be to betray that the war was going badly for them. Supply lines were being cut off. The Allied bombings had flattened Berlin. So came the bulletins, whispered covertly from prisoner to prisoner. Once Julian had heard it straight from Parkhurst, whom one assumed had it from the man with the secret radio. Now he had been cut out - presumed unreliable, one supposed - but the news still made its way back to him by the inevitable lines of camp gossip.

"And that's it for Berlin," said Bryce one day at the start of rehearsal. "I don't guess they'll let us rent any more costumes now."

At first Julian felt the interruption of the letters more keenly. His private parcels had been as regular and as generous as Hilary could contrive - packed, so she had said, with a consideration of both caloric density and nutritional balance. He had never felt replete while in camp; it was an impossibility. But he had had enough to persuade himself to put some by for a time of need. And now he was grateful.

His stockpile would have lasted longer if he had not shared his food with Bryce, but he never considered withholding it. Bryce had received only a few scattered parcels from friends at the beginning of the war. All that had gone long ago; he had nothing now.

Julian was dimly aware that there were other ways of finding food in camp. Theft, intrigue, gambling, throwing oneself upon the mercy of the black marketeers who seemed to control the American sector. Prostitution, once upon a time - even before he had gone on the stage Julian had found himself with no shortage of purportedly generous offers, all of which he had treated with the same polite indifference that he had shown the sixth formers at school. After his turns as Ophelia they had, for a time, become overwhelming. But that had ceased long ago; no one had the energy or desire for it now. The other possibilities remained, but Julian considered them no more likely than prostituting oneself. And Bryce, though they never discussed the question, apparently agreed.

"Don't tell me," said Bryce, using a finger-full of bread to scrape up the last scraps of potted meat from the corner of a tin. "I'm a charity case. _Noblesse oblige_. But I don't mind, I'm that hungry."

"You're welcome," Julian replied. "But I'll thank you not to talk about it like that."

He did not say - could not bring himself to say - that Bryce had given him far more. Not physically, but spiritually: the chance to live, to escape. To be an actor, really to act, which was more than his freedom in Gloucester had ever offered.

"You know they'll probably shoot us," Bryce added, having finished off the can and given its lid several licks for good measure. "The Germans."

"Will they? I hadn't thought."

"You never do. That's your charm. But think about it now. The Allies are coming. They're not just going to hand us back over with a _thank you for the loan_. We didn't come on Lend-Lease. Parkhurst and his lot must be making plans - haven't you heard anything?"

"It all sounds so silly, I try not to listen. It's like something out of _Boy's Own_. I escaped once, remember? But I could hardly have got far - I _didn't_ get far - and I certainly couldn't now, even if I did somehow get outside the wire. No one is in any condition for hard marches. Can you imagine the whole camp straggling across Germany like some sort of demented chorus line?"

Bryce laughed, forced and hollow. He had hardly put in the effort to make it sound genuine.

"I just never thought I'd die here, somehow. I keep thinking of it. But we are, aren't we? Little by little or all of a sudden. I can't see any other way out."

"I never thought I would live," said Julian thoughtfully.

His stocks of food did not last long after that conversation. They were all on camp food now, an inexorable belt-tightening beyond anything one could have imagined in civilian life. They had never eaten well. Now they were well below survival rations. These were starvation rations, achieving little more than staving off death, which drew closer and closer by the day.

Julian watched the slow changes in his face with fascination. He had always been good with makeup. If he had been asked at Oxford, or afterwards, to show himself on the verge of starvation, he would have gladly complied, thinking it an exciting challenge, and certain of his success. Now he knew that he could never have got close.

(Glancingly, he thought of how he had assured Hilary that he could say how she would look in decades hence. But this was different. Even if he were wrong about Hilary, it could not matter.)

Gazing into the cracked glass in the bathhouse, he ran his fingertips lightly over his face. The skull beneath the skin, as the saying went, had never been so apparent. His cheekbones, always prominent, stood out as though they might split his cheeks in two. His eyes were wide, the flesh sunk away from their orbits. Every tendon stood out in his hands as he moved his fingers in slow fascination.

"Some of us want to shave," said a neighbour, breaking his reverie, "if you're not going to."

Julian blinked in surprise. The stubble on his face had hardly attracted his notice. By the standards of the camp his hygiene had always been scrupulous - he could never help thinking of what his mother would say if she saw him - but now letting his beard grow seemed perhaps the best of a bad lot. It would, if nothing else, disguise the terrible, staring gauntness of his features.

"Not even Narcissus is beautiful now," said another, who had clearly received a better education.

"No, I'm sorry," said Julian, unable to keep the shortness from his voice. "I'm not shaving. I was just - never mind. I'm going now."

But he lingered by the door thinking about what he had seen, the way that experience had written itself across his face, the physical engraving of it only echoing the spiritual.

 _Don't say I haven't changed,_ he imagined saying to Hilary when (God willing) he found himself in her arms once again. _I have. And I'm glad._

***

Christmas came and went, as Christmas will, even in a prisoner-of-war camp. It was Julian's second in captivity, and it made the first seem an orgy of festivity by comparison. 

Not a proper holiday, that much was certain, but then none of Julian's wartime Christmases had been. All of them were empty, riotous celebrations on air bases, with Hilary unable to get away from hospital (she had let this slip by easily, saying she was used to it; he could not believe her), or cursory observances in rented rooms that, for all their efforts, had never become anything like home. They never had made a home together. That thought chilled him as much as did the snow falling outside. Perhaps they never would.

His last Christmas worthy of the name had been in 1938, at home in Larch Hill. He and his mother had together observed all the correct traditions, unchanged since his boyhood. Though it was only the two of them, he had never felt deprived of a wider family circle. This was all he knew; this was what Christmas ought to be. Once or twice, when he was young, they had gone to spend the season with one of her sisters; the invitations had come without fail every year - laced, as he understood later, with unmistakeable pity. The experience had offered him nothing. He liked his cousins well enough but he - the only one without a father - had sensed their condescension even then, and resented the adults for monopolising his mother's attention. All the festivities of a large family Christmas had counted not at all against the small observances of home.

To compare the camp Christmas to his last at Larch Hill seemed unjust in the extreme - a category error, as Tranter might have put it - for that had been blessed with both home and Hilary, a conjunction that might never come again.

He did not hold himself aloof from the festivities in camp. He had saved all the food he could spare against the day - blessedly little, the very last from the packages - and duly spent a morning helping to decorate the barracks hut, Bryce's hut, with paper chains, decorations beaten out of tin, and other improvised gaiety.

"You've an eye for it," said Bryce, who could just as easily have accomplished the task himself. But that was not the point.

It was counterfeit cheer, all of it - barring the pleasure of eating, which no one needed to feign. How could they celebrate when no one knew what the new year would hold? But the conscious artifice of it fascinated Julian. He joined in without any reserve, doing his best to make the illusion real. _Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die._

***

Reality was never far away. The new year brought it in abundance.

Men began to think once again of the world outside the barbed wire. To Julian it had been an abstraction ever since his first - and last - escape attempt. For some men it had been much longer. Now, unsettled, they tracked stray planes flying overhead until they were lost to view amidst the dark pine boughs. After every storm they gazed mournfully at the drifts of snow piled against the sides of the barracks, seeking to gauge its depth in the dark, silent, surrounding forest. They listened, hopeful and afraid, for the sound of distant guns.

And yet, for all the anticipation, no one was ready when the day finally came. It was early evening and the snow had begun falling hours earlier, blanketing the camp in white. Even the most dedicated of the circuit-bashers were indoors, huddled around makeshift braziers, when the guards began to cry:

" _Raus! Raus!_ "

At first the shouts were faint, swallowed up by the snowfall. But then a guard threw open the door of their barracks - the brazier guttered in the swirl of sudden, icy air - and there was no ignoring it any longer.

"Half hour only." He was an old man whose English was better than most. "Then we march. No delays. No one to stay. The Russians will shoot you all."

Julian's barracks was thrown into immediate, violent confusion. The news could hardly be said to be a surprise; they had known for weeks that the Soviet Army was on the advance, and any fool could read the lines on the map. Pankhurst, Feathers and their friends had spent months making plans, endlessly recast: escape, rebellion, rescue, flight, playacting one scenario and then another by turns. Like Bryce they believed, or had seemed to believe, that the Germans would massacre them all sooner than give them up to the Soviets or to their freedom. But there was no sign of that belief now, and no sign of any of their painstaking preparations. All in a rush his barrack-mates began gathering up their few belongings, suddenly and hastily packing to go. As if, like Julian, they had thought to do nothing, save wait in Stalag Luft for fate to overtake them. 

For a moment he stood, fascinated, watching the scene play out before him. 

_But of that day and hour knoweth no man,_ he found himself thinking, _no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only._

In the Lynchwick parish church he must have heard it read a score of times; likewise in the small camp chapel, whither he had sometimes been persuaded to go. But in his memory it was not the reading of the chaplain, nor the vicar at home - who had always cleared his throat with a rumble whenever he reached a suitably dramatic pause - but his mother's voice only.

She had taught Sunday school through all the years of his childhood, stopping only when he reached his teens, when she said that it was far past time to allow someone else the chance. As a small boy he had been struck by the distinction of having his mother as the teacher, for none of the other children could claim such an honour. She had been only too conscious of this, and at pains to counteract it; while she looked to each of the children in turn while reading, and addressed them always by name, for the most part she avoided Julian's gaze, as if it were improper to acknowledge one's own son in the midst of such a throng of dirty village children.

But he remembered that verse, how she had read it - her grey eyes finally directly meeting his own, as if she were looking into his soul and finding him wanting. Instead of pleasure he had felt only shame, and squirmed uneasily in his straight-backed wooden chair. She had read the verse with a special emphasis, so that he thought not of God, but only of his own father. She talked of him always, what he might want or believe or think of his only son. Julian knew perfectly well that he was dead - every Sunday he could see for himself the line in the church memorial - but for some reason the Bible always made him doubt it. His father was somewhere, knowing things which no man knew, and judging him always. It filled Julian with terror to think that anyone could know more than his mother.

She had explained the lesson further on their walk home, as she always did. One could hardly say so in front of the other children, but what the parable of the talents meant was that more, far more, was expected of him than ever would be of them. When one thought of all the advantages he possessed, she said, this was only just.

"And darling," she had said gently, annihilating all the pleasure he had felt in a Sunday walk by her side, "that includes sitting quietly in class, as a good boy would do."

Perhaps, thought Julian, standing in the middle of the barracks, it was just as well that he had so little now.

"You going to pull your finger out, Fleming?" asked Feathers, coming past with an armful of posessions.

Julian ignored this, as it deserved, but set to work nonetheless. 

There was little to pack and little to set aside, though the sparseness of one's small collection of belongings meant that each inspired its own fierce attachment. Thankfully, unlike some, he still had his flying jacket and his boots. In fact he was wearing them, there being little choice in the current temperature. (He looked out the window at the snow blowing past and fruitlessly wished, not for the first time, that he had been shot down wearing his greatcoat.)

He picked up the stack of letters from Hilary and his mother, promiscuously mixed together as they were, and tucked them into an inside pocket of his jacket. From their hiding place inside his straw _palliasse_ , he retrieved the medicines that Hilary had sent him, and likewise distributed them about his person. The few items of clothing he wasn't already wearing, he tucked into his pillow case to be carried on the march. Then he thought better of it and began to put them on too.

For a moment he gazed thoughtfully at his mother's angora socks. They remained as they must have been on the needle, unworn, and still the snowy, untouched natural white of Mrs. Pascoe's beloved rabbits. His mother had likely never imagined him wearing them out of bed, much less on a march. _But needs must, there's nothing warmer,_ he told himself, and then: _she'll never have to know_. As he put them on, the second thought reassured him far more.

A matter of minutes and he was done. For a moment he stood studying the empty bunk where he had lain every night thinking faithfully of Hilary. He felt a pang of anticipatory nostalgia that took him by surprise; who would ever imagine regret at leaving a prison camp? But he did, in a way that he had never felt about Oxford at the end of term.

He wished that he could go and say goodbye to the theatre, but time was hastening on; some of his barrack-mates had already gone.

After a moment's thought he picked up the woolen blanket from his bed and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then he went out into the yard.

***

It was a strange _Appel_ , taking place in the pitch of night. The guards shouted; the snow swirled, coming down even harder than before. Everyone was on edge; there was none of the usual joking or goon-bating disobedience. The commandant gave a brief speech, his words whipped away by the wind. Everyone listened but there was no more to glean than they had been told by the guard before: the Russians were coming, they were leaving immediately, there was to be no slackening of the pace or staying behind. If they did, they would be shot.

As this speech was delivered, Julian looked round with increasing anxiety. Men were pressed close around him, Feathers just to his right, Parkhurst a little distance ahead. Further away, faces were indistinct in the crowd, obscured by the veil of snow, made strange by the depth of the night. Like Julian himself, men were dressed in layers, unfamiliarly costumed, like extras in Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

Anxiety clutched at his stomach. He could not see Bryce anywhere. It was not a matter of sentimentality. Relations with his barrack-mates had not improved since that first falling-out with Parkhurst. They had made it very clear that he was no longer any concern of theirs; they would not give him the time of day on the march, or look out for him if he fell.

But Julian's concerns were nothing to the great, implacable machinery of the camp. The motion towards the gates had already begun.

There was a bottleneck there, all the men in the camp waiting impatiently to pass the threshold that most of them had not crossed since their arrival at Stalag Luft. For Julian it was the second time, but now, this time, he was himself alone.

Far to the right he heard a lone voice raised in song. 'When the lights go on again.' A scattering of ironic cheers. It was Bryce.

They came together a little beyond the gate. Bryce had stood to one side, ignoring an old guard who was half-heartedly urging him onwards. He was wearing a costume cloak that he must have kept back from the last lot of Berlin rentals - Julian was shocked at this transgression even as he recognised its good sense - and a cap that he had knitted himself from scraps.

"Waiting for you, of course," he said, in response to Julian's questioning look. "Silly boy."

They linked arms and strode onwards into the unknown future.

***

It was very cold. The snow was coming down steadily - not the wet, clustered flakes of his Gloucestershire boyhood, but a dry, fine, constant fall of snowflakes individual, snowflakes in the millions. They caught in his eyelashes, he inhaled them and fell into a fit of coughing when he took an unwary breath, they obscured all but the nearest of vision. Under his boots the drifting snow squeaked warningly with the cold.

For long minutes Julian wondered where the railway station was, when they would come to the village, whether he might finally see Karl's cottage. Then, a slow dawning, he realised that all of them were behind him already, passed by unnoticed in the storm. How easy it was to miss everything. All one could see in the swirling white were the shadows of endless pine trees.

For the first hour it was bearable, almost enjoyable: the snow, the dark of night, the strangeness of their passage. He had Bryce by his side for companionship, and the tiny rattle of the pills in their bottles, tucked into an inner pocket of his jacket, were a reassuring talisman

Julian's feet were warm in his angora socks. He was glad of the blanket he had thrown round his shoulders at the last minute. He was glad that he had decided, once the acting had ceased, to grow a beard; it had turned out rather better than he had expected, from an aesthetic point of view, and it warmed his cheeks in the sharp wind from the East. 

For the second hour it was miserable. Walking in the snow was all very well when one could anticipate going home to a warm fire and a cup of hot cocoa, when one had not spent months already with hunger a constant companion. The snow fell implacably, without respite, harder and faster and thicker. It dragged at his feet as he walked. Despite all the unaccustomed exertion of the march, despite all his efforts to shake it off, the cold sunk into him, as numbing as despair. 

The third hour was hellish. After that it grew worse.

They walked all night, into a thin, dim, hungry dawn. The sky was the colour of milk diluted with water. Julian hardly noticed. He was following the tracks of the man in front of him, head down. He could not think; he did not want to. He only kept going. 

It was nothing like that pleasant place in which he had drifted after being thrown from Biscuit. Truly this was purgatory.

It was the afternoon before the guards let them rest, finally far enough from the advancing Russians to stop and breathe. They collapsed where they could, littering the streets of the small village where they had paused their march, a few lucky men curling up in sheds and barns where they could find the room. The storm had passed now. A few tattered scraps of pale blue showed overhead, a sudden slant of winter light against a rough brick wall. But the sun never touched Julian, and already he could feel the night coming on.

Slowly a cart creaked its way into the village, pulled by a horse almost as emaciated as the men. One could hardly see the boards of the cart for the number of men draped across it, lying as still as so many rags. Others trailed beside, leaning against it when they might. This was the pitiful remnants of the camp hospital, whose ranks had already swollen on the march.

Julian recognised the doctor by sight, a man who had looked harassed at the best of times and now seemed to have been carried along by sheer desperation.

"No, there's nothing," he was saying to one of the medics. "Aspirin from the Red Cross parcels. I don't know what you expect me to do."

Going to step around the cart, Julian heard again the small rattle of the pills in his pocket. He felt a surge of guilt. So long had he kept them that he had almost forgotten they were not only obscure tokens of Hilary's love, but also real, tangible things that might be of service. He had, he told himself, never held them back consciously. Now there was no choice to be made.

"You should have these," he said, and winced with the cold as he unzipped his flight jacket. "Here."

His hand was shaking as he held out the bottles; the diamorph slipped from his grasp into the snow. He bent painfully to retrieve it.

"Sulfa?" exclaimed the doctor. "Phenobarbital? How the hell did you get these?"

Too late Julian realised that the man must think them stolen or obtained on the black market, meant for profit or worse.

"My wife," he said simply, for there was nothing else to say. "She's a surgeon."

For a moment the thought of Hilary's beneficent presence descended upon him like a blessing. Then, concluding that to stay would do little good, he nodded at the doctor and withdrew. Luckily no one possessed the energy to pursue him.

That night he and Bryce found themselves a resting place in a farmyard whose churned, rutted mud had frozen as solid as stone. They huddled together in a corner between the barn and the wall of the farmhouse, hoping that it would keep off the wind. Julian wrapped his blanket half around Bryce's shoulders; they leaned closer, any shyness or self-consciousness forgotten, for they could think of nothing but searching out any scrap of warmth. He could hear the rumbling of Bryce's stomach as clearly as his own. The last meagre rations, given them before they left camp, they had eaten on the march.

To be allowed to sit had at first seemed a blessing. Now the iron chill of the icy ground seeped into his body, sapping what little strength remained to him. Julian shifted painfully, trying to find a position where the armoured earth did not dig into him. He seemed to have no flesh or muscle left, only bare bones underneath his skin, and all of them ached with cold.

"It won't do you any good moving about," grumbled Bryce quietly. "One way is as bad as another."

"Sorry. I'll try to stop."

"Stop shivering while you're at it. Bad for morale. Don't you know there's a war on?"

Julian tried to muster a chuckle but it died in his throat. He could not counterfeit. He could not remember how. For the first time in his life he was left with nothing but himself.

"The war is over for us," he said.

Overhead the twilight was fading. Stars began to show in the royal blue sky, glittering and intense. The last scraps of cloud were disappearing now, leaving the sky devastatingly clear. It was glorious and terrifying, for the temperature was dropping still further.

"I used to read all about Arctic exploration," said Bryce some moments later. "When I was working in the garage. _Last Voyage of the Karluk, The Worst Journey in the World,_ Shackleton, all of them."

"Did you?"

How odd that one could still make such motions of politeness when everything else was gone. But he hoped that Bryce would keep talking, to cover the quiet sounds of suffering around them in the dark, and the moaning wind.

"Always wanted to go on one myself. They used to bring fellows just to fetch and carry, and fix things I suppose, it wasn't all officers and scientists and that. But one has to have been to university nowadays; at least I've never seen a notice in the _Times_ , and I did used to look."

Julian was reminded that a man in his college had gone on the Spitsbergen expedition with Glen from Balliol. It had all seemed rather romantic upon first glance, and then had resolved itself into a lot of talk about rocks, glaciation and strata. Having read English, he would never have been asked to go along anyway.

"Perhaps if we get out of this," he offered.

"No, when we get out of this I'm going to the south of France. They must need English actors down there for all the holiday-makers, mustn't they? I could find out, at least, on my demob pay. Cannes, Monaco, sun and sand. Just like in _Easy Virtue_..."

He sighed longingly. 

"We should go, then," said Julian, who had spent a month of sincere boredom with his mother in Villefranche-sur-Mer, the year after his finals. "You and I, after the war, whether we act or not."

"And eat seven courses a day."

"No, I mean it."

Although Julian could envision the landscape of the French Riviera with perfect clarity, the idea of a three-course dinner, much less seven, seemed as remote as the moon. Bryce, perhaps feeling the same, had fallen silent.

"I went with my mother," Julian said, carrying on talking for the sake of talking. "She wanted to go; I didn't mind, at least it seemed as good a place as any. But I wonder now whether she was hoping I'd meet the right sort of girl. I hadn't at Oxford, not to propose to at any rate, and there was no one the right age near Larch Hill." He thought briefly of the village girls, of the daughters of the Duke of Beaufort, with whom he had ridden to hounds. But still it was true. "So I spent weeks having the most dreary, dutiful teas you can imagine with girls who would rather have been reading Compton Mackenzie and girls who would rather have been playing baccarat at Monte Carlo, and everyone in between. And every time she looked at me from the other side of the room I had the feeling I was doing it wrong, or she would rather I wasn't doing it at all, or something. So it all got nowhere."

Bryce laughed. "Why didn't you take them to tea somewhere else?"

"It never occurred to me. But I don't suppose that I wanted it to go anywhere, after all."

This was the most he had talked to Bryce about his mother at a stretch. They had confined themselves for the most part to the business of the theatre, and not considered their friendship any less, for they had been talking - so they felt - of what they loved most of all.

"And then you married Hilary instead," said Bryce.

"And then Hilary married me," said Julian.

There was a long silence. Somewhere in the darkness a man was coughing: long, agonising, phlegmy coughs that ended finally in a rattle, and a retch, and the sound of spitting. Then it began again.

"Don't let's talk about after the war," said Bryce. "It won't be like that. You know it won't. Maybe in fifty years when we're both old buffers at the regimental reunion. But not in the mean time. I'll be back in rep, if I'm lucky, living in bedsits for the rest of my days. You'll be... back in Gloucestershire, I suppose, playing lord of the manor. It can't be like it is now."

Julian shivered convulsively. Long ago he had become too cold to shiver, but this was something deeper than the cold. He had allowed himself to begin to believe that he would be able to go on acting beside Bryce, to make a small reputation for himself, to continue to grasp at what his time in the camp had given him. But how likely was that, when not even Bryce could believe in it?

"If we get home."

"If we get home," Bryce echoed.

There was almost a relief in thus refusing to contemplate the future, to recognise what might divide them, to acknowledge the failures that they each carried with them, baggage that remained when all other worldly encumberances and possessions had been thrown away on the march. There was nothing now but the two of them and the cold of the wind.

"Look, move this way a bit," said Bryce.

Julian obliged, pressing his side as close against his fellow man as he could manage. Bryce took the corner of the wool blanket that Julian still wore wrapped around his shoulders, and placed it around his own. He took Julian's hands in his, a sexless gesture of warmth and intimacy that seemed, to Julian, the kindest thing Bryce had ever done.

"It hardly seems to make a difference, does it?" said Bryce. "It's that arctic."

"But it's much nicer," said Julian. He attempted to squeeze Bryce's hand but his fingers were too numb to grip.

"Much nicer, my dear."

And yet Bryce was right; it did nothing against the cold. They huddled together fruitlessly, attempting to imagine warmth, a thought more distant than the moon. For what felt like hours Julian sat agonisingly awake, staring upwards at the close and pitiless stars. One could not resist, helpless in that icy grip. One could hardly even breathe.

Finally, insensibly, he drifted away. It was not sleep; it could not be gentled with that name. It was the black of unconsciousness. He had felt it before; it was the first step towards extinction. Gratefully, gladly, Julian Fleming descended into night.

Suspended in blackness, he had no need to open his eyes nor to reach out. He knew, with that knowledge that is beyond the senses: she was with him. She had not rejected him; she had come to him now, at the last. And she was holding his hand.

***

Julian felt only the impact of the slap across his face; of the brush of fingers against skin, there was nothing.

"Julian, duckie, _wake up_ ," came an angry, insistent, terrified voice. Another slap. Someone was shaking him.

He opened his eyes with difficulty, his lashes gummed with sleep and frost. It was still dark. Bryce was standing over him.

"Lord above, Julian, I thought you were dead. Get up, _please_. Get up."

"I was only sleeping," said Julian.

The dream came back to him now, overwhelming in its force, yet already receding into the distance of memory. He could no longer feel her touch. He only felt the truth, its meaning. He realised that he was weeping.

"What is it? Are you all right?"

Julian began to chuckle at the thought that anyone on the march after years as a prisoner could ask such a question. Then his eyes brimmed over. Cold tears tracked down his cheeks and began to freeze themselves in his beard.

He was more than all right. Finally, on the edge of death, she had given him the assurance that she had withheld before. He was forgiven everything. He was saved.

"She came to me," he said, gulping back the tears. "Everything is all right. I know now."

"My dear, you're mad."

Julian gave Bryce a brilliant smile, then wiped at his eyes with the filthy blanket. "Hadn't you noticed?"

"It doesn't matter. You have to get up. They won't wait."

Only now did Julian notice the sky. No longer black, it was lightening to a dark, bruised blue. Dawn was coming. Amidst the greys of the farmyard he could make out the dark shapes of men on the ground, lying like so many sacks of potatoes. Among them stalked the guards, here and there pushing at stragglers with the barrels of their rifles. It was morning. They were back on the march.

***

Of the next few days Julian was to remember little. It had attained the shape of nightmare, so that his dreams - coming to him sometimes, in his exhaustion, in brief, snatched moments on his feet - seemed more real than his waking existence.

Men straggled more and more. The column thinned; every so often one saw a man collapsed in a snowbank, or leaned up against a wall, finished and done. No one cared, now. None of the guards could have mustered the interest to shoot. They had their own survival to think of.

Julian could have been finished. He reflected upon this, periodically, his mind kicking into gear like a machine long abandoned but still - just - functional. He had come close to dying that night. He might well have died if Bryce had not roused him.

Once he might have regretted that he had not been allowed to slip peacefully away. Other men had given in, welcoming the end to pain as a mercy. But having come so far, he felt that such an end would be ignoble, like slipping out of the theatre before the curtain fell. He would see the thing through.

Besides, without him, who would have looked after Bryce? He thought this with a quiet sense of pride. He had looked after his ferrets with intense solicitude (too much, said his mother, with a mysterious allusion to Saki which he had not understood until years later); Biscuit, until she had banished him forever, even more so. But another human being, never. He had not imagined that anyone else could need him. Certainly it was impossible to imagine Hilary, so gloriously assured and self-sufficient, needing anyone.

Bryce needed him. They urged one another along, step by weary step. Julian supported Bryce, whose feet had become badly frostbitten. (The angora socks, thought Julian. A sign of guilty privilege to the last.) What meagre scraps of food they could gather, they shared, heated with scraps of twigs over the little brazier that Bryce had carried to the last, after his cherished copy of _Hamlet_ had long since gone to light the flames and all his other possessions lay discarded on the road. They slept leaning together, Julian's blanket wrapped around them both.

And every night, exhausted though he was, he kept his imagined rendezvous with Hilary - the real Hilary, lest by tempting the goddess he should summon her to gather him unwished to her bosom.

All he could remember now was his need for her, a need still so strongly present that it was raw. All he dreamt of saying to her was _I miss you, I need you, I can't live without you_. But though he loved her, and longed for her, and worshipped her - and always would - he knew now that this last was not really true. Not now. Not anymore.

He could live without her. Painfully, he had learned this.

One day, if he lived, he hoped that he would forget it again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks once again to Lilliburlero for beta-reading and support.
> 
> If you would like to read a far more accurate and dramatic non-fiction book on this chapter's theme, I recommend _The Last Escape_ by John Nichol and Tony Rennell.


End file.
